Ted Neward's Bloghttp://blogs.tedneward.com/
Recent content on Ted Neward's BlogHugo -- gohugo.ioen-usTue, 29 Aug 2017 22:18:07 -0700On the Google-bro Memohttp://blogs.tedneward.com/post/on-google-bro-memo/
Tue, 29 Aug 2017 22:18:07 -0700http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/on-google-bro-memo/
<p><em>tl;dr</em> By now, everybody has heard of the memo that was passed around by the Google-bro, claiming that Google should reduce its efforts at explicit diversity hiring and how his message was unwelcome within Google&rsquo;s halls; my reaction is that he had a small point, but it was drowned in the inanity of his larger, and far more incorrect, message.</p>
<p>First, let&rsquo;s set a few facts out into the world:</p>
<ol>
<li>I read the memo. Front to back, top to bottom.</li>
<li>I spent a significant amount of my college years analyzing papers like these.</li>
<li>My politics tend to stem from left of center principles, although I have for years believed that the nation is best served by a healthy balance between right and left. (For example, I mourn the loss of a conservative party in the US whose principal concern is reducing government spending.)</li>
<li>I do not now work for Google, nor have I ever.</li>
</ol>
<p>Having established that, let&rsquo;s begin.</p>
<h3 id="summary-of-the-memo:3fa174188fcb08674214e2904aec3bc4">Summary of the memo</h3>
<p>Effectively, my read on the memo was simple: Google-bro sought (despite all the caveats and disclaimers) to effectively posit the argument that women are inferior to men as Google employees, and that therefore the efforts Google puts in to hire them are efforts that could be better used elsewhere. (Or, put another way, the gender gap in tech is explainable not by systemic bias in the industry, but by other factors that Google fails to recognize, and that programs that seek to reduce that gap are wasteful and potentially creating greater problems.) He also states that this argument is not welcome inside of Google because of the monocultural echo chamber that Google has built that makes people of right-of-center beliefs feel unwelcome, unaccepted, and &ldquo;shamed&rdquo; for their beliefs.</p>
<h3 id="reaction-from-the-outside:3fa174188fcb08674214e2904aec3bc4">Reaction from the outside</h3>
<p>Reactions of course spanned a gamut of emotion. Much of it centered around the notions of free speech and reverse discrimination, or in some cases reacting to Google&rsquo;s reaction to terminate the Google-bro&rsquo;s employment.</p>
<p>Many were outraged at the argument about women being inferior in technology, but for the most part, as is common in this industry around the critical points, everybody was basically arguing past each other: &ldquo;Misogyny!&rdquo; &ldquo;Free speech!&rdquo; &ldquo;Misogyny!&rdquo; &ldquo;Free speech!&rdquo; <em>ad infinitum</em>.</p>
<p>Some chose to try to co-mingle the two points, including the essay written by one well-known industry talking head who chose to frame his discussion in terms of an elevator or some such. Alas, that well-known industry pundit&rsquo;s piece entitled &ldquo;Thought Police&rdquo; did nothing to really shed any light on the subject, and his follow-up piece lamenting the inability to discuss things rationally similarly failed to offer up anything resembling a discussion. Or rational thought. He then later offered up a piece about his experience working with women in technology which, as is common for white dudes who want to continue to believe that there&rsquo;s no real gender issue in the technical world, because he hadn&rsquo;t really run across it. He cites his horrible mistake at a keynote that actually offended a ton of people (calling it &ldquo;stumbling upon an <em>issue</em>&rdquo;, italics included), but never really apologizes for actually having, you know, offended anybody. (His take is that &ldquo;I thought about the complaints and issued appropriate apologies if I thought they had a reasonable point.&rdquo; Because only the rational and reasonable are due an apology when a mistake is made.)</p>
<p>(In the same post, he goes on to talk about &ldquo;character assassination&rdquo; conducted against him, which I personally find amusing in a post entitled &ldquo;Women in Tech&rdquo;. Yes, Uncle Bob, I&rsquo;m referring to you; no, I&rsquo;m not seeking to assassinate your character; yes, I&rsquo;m calling you out for having made multiple mistakes on this issue; and no, I&rsquo;m not expecting that you will come to hear anything I say here as a reasonable or rational discussion. I have tremendous respect for your professional skill, but my respect for your personal morals and ethics has taken a huge hit, nor am I in any way under the illusion that your stance on this issue will be affected an iota by my analysis, commentary or opinion. What you choose to do from here is, as always, entirely up to you.)</p>
<p>Unfortunately, numerous people have made similar mistakes, conflating the two issues, until it got all well out of hand and impossible to discuss in any way, shape or form even remotely resembling fair, calm, or open-minded exchange. I chose to wait for a while before throwing my own comments out into the world. I don&rsquo;t expect that this will do much to provide additional clarity, but the more I was chewing it over in my head, the more I wanted to get all these thoughts out.</p>
<h2 id="disclaimer:3fa174188fcb08674214e2904aec3bc4">Disclaimer</h2>
<p>I don&rsquo;t mean to suggest that these views represent anybody&rsquo;s viewpoint but my own.</p>
<p>In point of fact, my company recently posted <a href="http://developers.smartsheet.com/node/7741">a statement</a> on their position on the whole thing, which I thought was neatly summarized by this single sentence:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In short, our position is this: If we didn’t think each and every one of our employees had smart things to say, they wouldn’t be here. We will fight to ensure that every employee’s voice is heard, so long as it does no harm to anyone else.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>You can stop right here if you want to&mdash;that&rsquo;s basically the <em>tl;dr</em> version of my own viewpoints on the matter. What follows is my dissection of what I thought was a ridiculously poorly-written position paper.</p>
<h2 id="my-take:3fa174188fcb08674214e2904aec3bc4">My take</h2>
<p>As I said above, I noted two basic points to the memo, but those points comprise some pretty wide territory, so I will seek to address them in manageable pieces.</p>
<h3 id="biodeterminism:3fa174188fcb08674214e2904aec3bc4">Biodeterminism</h3>
<p>Google-bro&rsquo;s main argument, that women are somehow not as well-suited for positions at Google as men are, is an argument that reappears every decade or two, and its more widely known as &ldquo;biodeterminism&rdquo;, that is, that your biology has a deterministic effect on your success at a particular &ldquo;thing&rdquo;. It was widely used, for example, as an argument in the years leading up to the Civil War against the Negro race being able to survive in a modern world.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Among our neighbors of Central and Southern America, we see the Caucasian mingled with the Indian and the African. They have the forms of free government, because they have copied them. To its benefits they have not attained, because that standard of civilization is above their race. <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jefferson_Davis">Jefferson Davis, Speech, 1858</a></p>
<p>We recognize the fact of the inferiority stamped upon that race of men [African-American] by the Creator, and from the cradle to the grave, our Government, as a civil institution, marks that inferiority. <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jefferson_Davis">Reply in the Senate to William H. Seward (29 February 1860), Senate Chamber, U.S. Capitol. As quoted in The Papers of Jefferson Davis, Volume 6, pp. 277–84. Transcribed from the Congressional Globe, 36th Congress, 1st Session, pp. 916–18.</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Biodeterminism (also known as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism">&ldquo;scientific racism&rdquo;</a> has been used in all sorts of arguments, including those which have suggested that black atheletes are naturally more athletic than their white counterparts, or that Asians are intrinsically better studiers, and so on. In fact, it goes back centuries, including but not limited to the development of the IQ test, as well as the study of &ldquo;craniometry&rdquo;, or that the shape of your skull is a highly determining factor in your intelligence.</p>
<p>In 1981, Stephen Jay Gould wrote <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007Q6XN2S">the definitive takedown</a> of biodeterminism as an argument, in response to much of the biodeterministic argument taking place at the time. (He wrote a revised edition in response to the same argument that cropped up a decade or so later. He&rsquo;s since passed away, or I suspect he&rsquo;d be hard at work on a third edition.) A paleontologist by training, Gould effectively sought to demonstrate that much of the evidence being submitted as supportive of a theory of biological determination of intelligence was in effect bad science and confirmation bias of the researchers&rsquo; pre-determined opinion. (His work was criticized in turn for succumbing to bad science, but much of that was done by those who sought to push the biodeterministic argument forward&mdash;his science has since been cleared, though his prose is argued to be a bit &ldquo;overgeneralized&rdquo; and &ldquo;broad&rdquo; in places, which is a fair critique.)</p>
<p>More to the point, Google-bro&rsquo;s work in the memo was shoddy and largely unsubstantiated. For example, he listed a number of ways men and women differ biologically, such as &ldquo;The underlying traits are highly heritable&rdquo;, a wonderfully vague statement that fails to list the traits of which he speaks, how they are heritable, which traits aren&rsquo;t heritable, and by what scientific basis he makes the claim. (We won&rsquo;t even begin to dissect the point &ldquo;[The biological differences are] exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective.&ldquo;)</p>
<p>His attempts at making use of gender stereotypes as assumed psychological behavior of all (or at least a stastically significant majority) men and women involved in technology is cherry-picked at best. For example, he cites the Wikipedia article <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology">&ldquo;Sex differences in psychology&rdquo;</a> for his &ldquo;differences in personality traits&rdquo;, and yet fails to note the very first line of that page, which reads:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sex differences in psychology or gender differences are differences in the mental functions and behaviors of the sexes, and are due to a complex interplay of biological, developmental, and cultural factors. Differences have been found in a variety of fields such as mental health, cognitive abilities, personality, and tendency towards aggression. Such variation may be both innate or learned and is often very difficult to distinguish. Modern research attempts to distinguish between such differences, and to analyze any ethical concerns raised. Since behavior is a result of interactions between nature and nurture researchers are interested in investigating how biology and environment interact to produce such differences,[1][2][3] although this is often not possible.[4]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In particular, let&rsquo;s take note of the sentence &ldquo;Such variation may be both innate or learned and is often very difficult to distinguish&rdquo;, which sort of blew right past him when he read the page.</p>
<p>Also of particular interest is the last sentence of the opening section:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Differences in socialization of males and females may decrease or increase the size of sex differences.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Considering that much of the criticism leveled at the industry from women in the field centers around the social aspects&mdash;and the fact that they are routinely subjected to a degree of criticism and discrimination (accidental or otherwise)&mdash;including but not limited to the assumption made at very early ages that &ldquo;boys are better at math and science&rdquo;, it seems that at the very least, Google-bro&rsquo;s biodeterminstic argument is on flawed and very, very shaky ground. Lacking any sort of empirical evidence or experiments specific to this industry, it is reasonable to conclude that his argument is fundamentally flawed, particularly considering the overwhelming amount of anecdotal (and some scientific) evidence to suggest that yes, there is in fact a structural bias weighing in against women in technology.</p>
<p>And frankly, that&rsquo;s not the point I really want to discuss.</p>
<h3 id="free-speech:3fa174188fcb08674214e2904aec3bc4">Free speech</h3>
<p>The right of free speech is guaranteed by the Consitution of the United States, such that the government is not permitted to muzzle its citizens with regard to the topics they wish to discuss in public. You may demonstrate, you may assemble, and you may criticize your government and/or its leaders all without fear of reprisal by said government or any of its executive/enforcement bodies.</p>
<p>That said, however, a private company is not a government. Google has every right to terminate the employment of any of its employees &ldquo;for cause&rdquo; so long as that cause is not explicitly protected by law. You may not terminate somebody because of the color of their skin, the plumbing of their genitalia, the invisible entity they choose to worship, or the number of years they&rsquo;ve spent on the planet; these are all protected by law.</p>
<p>The right to assemble, the right to speak your political mind, or the right to be ridiculously stupid are not protected rights within a private organization. (Neither is the length of hair, by the way, nor the kind of shoes you choose to wear.) If an employee walks into the company and states, &ldquo;I believe that Adolf Hitler was a great man&rdquo; in a very loud voice, that company has every right to terminate that person&rsquo;s employment every bit as much as if the same individual were to walk in and start proclaiming his allegiance to Stalin. Or to start chanting phrases from the Necronomicon.</p>
<p>The cause here is not based on the words coming out of their mouth, but the impact those words are having on the people around them&mdash;frankly, walking into your place of employment and spending the day trying to convert everybody over to your form of religion is equally grounds for termination, <em>because you are impeding their work product</em> by making them uncomfortable. It has nothing to do with the content of your words, but everything to do with the impact it is having on the people around you. Naturally, the more extreme the viewpoint, the more uncomfortable people will become, particularly if you come in wearing clothing and accessories that support that viewpoint, if only because they&rsquo;re thrust into a situation where they aren&rsquo;t sure how to react. Even if that viewpoint is &ldquo;The US Army is an amazing place to be&rdquo;, if you&rsquo;re decked out in fatigues and carrying a mock rifle.</p>
<p>(True story: I contracted for a firm where one of the project managers was a recently-retired US Army vet. He was methodical, disciplined, and very effective as a project manager. However, over a span of four months, he grew increasingly irritable, came to work in his fatigues, and openly discussed killing techniques. Several complaints were filed, and the company finally took action when he came to work openly wearing his survival knife on his belt, since bringing a weapon onto company grounds was a clear violation of the company handbook. Prior to that, however, the company had already started to assemble the necessary documentation to demonstrate that his actions were creating a hostile workplace environment, so barring any major shift in his personality back to a more workplace-friendly manner, his termination was essentially assured. In retrospect, it was pretty clear he was suffering from some sort of PTSD-ish affliction, but any suggestions that he might want to look into some form of counseling or therapy were basically met with, &ldquo;Are you saying I&rsquo;m unable to do my job? Are you calling me incompetent?&rdquo; and a very threatening look. Most people stopped trying to help him after that, unfortunately. More to the point, however, even had he not brought the knife, his manner, his dress and his choice of topics made many people very concerned about coming in to work&mdash;he would today be easily labled as a &ldquo;disgruntled employee risk&rdquo;&mdash;and the company had every right, if not outright requirement, to terminate his employment. Their hesitation was driven by the fact that HR needed to make sure they had the necessary documentation in case of lawsuit.)</p>
<h3 id="employer-resources:3fa174188fcb08674214e2904aec3bc4">Employer resources</h3>
<p>Google has been criticized by both sides: from the left, for not firing Google-bro right away, and from the right, for firing him at all. &ldquo;Unsafe!&rdquo; screams the left, and &ldquo;Thought police!&rdquo; screams the right. Google-bro filed a wrongful termination lawsuit immediately after his firing, which will make interesting fodder for the legal pages once it finally reaches a judge, if ever&mdash;it&rsquo;s actually in Google&rsquo;s best interest to make the case quietly disappear, most likely by trading a non-defamation clause and gag order in exchange for a cash payout.</p>
<p>Again, regardless of the content, the bigger question here is, did the individual make use of company resources&mdash;his Google email account, his Google-issued equipment, the Google-supplied network or the Google-paid time&mdash;to engage in any of this? If so, he is clearly subject to the terms and conditions of his employment agreement, which usually state that such resources may not be used for personal purposes. Writing said memo, particularly one that was not submitted through any sort of HR channel or to his supervisors anywhere along the hierarchy, pretty much qualifies as personal purposes, every bit as much as using those resources to write a work of fiction would.</p>
<p>If Google-bro made use of company resources to write and/or distribute his memo, he&rsquo;s basically in violation of the company&rsquo;s terms of service, and that&rsquo;s pretty much all she wrote there. If he wrote the memo on his personal Google Docs account (not his work one), on his own time, on his own laptop, and used his personal GMail account to send it to others at Google on their personal accounts (not their work accounts), then he can claim that he never used Google-corporate resources, and that this was every bit a &ldquo;personal&rdquo; exercise. Chances of this being the case? Pretty close to nil, from what little evidence I can see.</p>
<p>If Google-bro can prove that this memo was, in fact, something he was expected and/or asked to do as part of his assigned duties, this becomes a very different scenario. Even then, however, we run into the next point.</p>
<h3 id="employer-damage:3fa174188fcb08674214e2904aec3bc4">Employer damage</h3>
<p>If an employee does damage to the company in some tangible form, such as engaging in activites that harm the company&rsquo;s reputation (which I would argue would be the case here), then the employer absolutely has cause to terminate. Nowhere in the employee handbook at most programming positions does it say that stealing an entire Office Depot&rsquo;s worth of stationery supplies is grounds for termination, nor does it say that standing outside the company waving a sign that says &ldquo;This company is run by a neo-Nazi&rdquo; is grounds for termination. In fact, there&rsquo;s a lot of things that a company doesn&rsquo;t explicit say are grounds for termination, because anything that can be demonstrated to cause harm can be used as sufficient grounds.</p>
<p>Consider the sample corporate e-mail and Internet use policy <a href="https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/policies/pages/cms_006400.aspx">here</a>; it states that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All technology provided by [Company Name], including computer systems, communications networks, company-related work records and other information stored electronically, is the property of the company and not the employee. In general, use of the company’s technology systems and electronic communications should be job-related and not for personal convenience.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It&rsquo;s entirely likely that if you work in this industry, you signed something similar at your place of business, and if you&rsquo;re using your company laptop to write code for a side project, you&rsquo;re exposing that side project to a potential IP-ownership claim from your company to that side project. Most companies choose to look the other way on most personal- or personal-ish use, largely because it&rsquo;s hard to police and because they want to allow employees the freedom to use those resources in exchange for employees&rsquo; willingness to work a little extra beyond the standard 40 hours, but make no mistake&mdash;companies can, and will, assert that clause when it&rsquo;s apparent that what&rsquo;s being done harms them.</p>
<p>Such as this case.</p>
<h3 id="free-speech-redux:3fa174188fcb08674214e2904aec3bc4">Free speech (redux)</h3>
<p>But the issue Google-bro raises about free speech does highlight something that every company needs to be aware of: psychological safety. Google, as is also true of many other Silicon Valley companies, is quite left-leaning in their internal political views. For those of us who are of similar minds, that&rsquo;s comforting and feels natural. However, national statistics don&rsquo;t lie; only about half of us actually feel that way.</p>
<p>Just as a left-leaning individual will feel a little out of place in a company that leans right, a right-leaning individual will feel similarly misunderstood in a company that leans left. And it should be obvious that there&rsquo;s limits even in the case where one leans in the same direction as the company&mdash;if executives at Google started advocating the violent overthrow of capitalist governments in order to usher in a glorious new age of the proletariat, a significant number of Google employees would feel really uncomfortable.</p>
<p>This is perhaps the only place where Google needs to consider its actions terminating the Google-bro a little more carefully. Did they, by their action, lead those who &ldquo;lean right&rdquo; to feel more uncomfortable and unwelcome at work? If so, they&rsquo;ve bought themselves a much deeper and more problematic issue than just what Google-bro&rsquo;s misguided essay brought to their doorstep.</p>
<p>His point that &ldquo;People generally have good intentions, but we all have biases which are invisible to us&rdquo; is a reasonable one, actually, and one confirmed by numerous psychological experiments over the past several decades. He goes on to say</p>
<blockquote>
<p>At Google, we talk so much about unconscious bias as it applies to race and gender, but we rarely discuss our moral biases.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Again, I do not work at Google so I cannot comment on the truth of this statement as it applies at Google, but it is a fair point to suggest that companies often do not openly discuss the &ldquo;moral biases&rdquo; (although that term is pretty ambiguous and never defined within the scope of his memo) amongst the employees. That seems a fair statement to make.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Political orientation is actually a result of deep moral preferences and thus biases.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is where things start to go off the rails&mdash;political orientation is most often a combination of a large number of factors, and to suggest that they stem entirely (or even mostly) from &ldquo;deep moral preferences&rdquo; is fallacious. (Evidence: How many of the Christian Crusade voted for Donald Trump, a man who is divorced three times, each time to the woman he was cheating on his previous wife with? If we use that&mdash;or any of a number of other political examples&mdash;as the means by which to examine the statement, either the Christian Crusade clearly does not care about sexual fidelity in its elected leaders despite their protests to the contrary during the Clinton Administration, or the statement simply does not hold.)</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Considering that the overwhelming majority of the social sciences,
media, and Google lean left, we should critically examine these prejudices.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And this is where things really fall apart.</p>
<p>Much of the social sciences, while it does demonstrate strong political leanings, does not overly lean left. (Let&rsquo;s also leave alone the idea that the &ldquo;social sciences&rdquo; is another wonderfully vague and ambiguous noun that never gets defined.) Because much social science research is conducted on college campuses, it is easy to assume that anyone teaching a sociology class is immediately a leftist, but in fact, if we extend the definition of &ldquo;the social sciences&rdquo; to include the practice of social science, such as sales, marketing or human resources, it&rsquo;s pretty clear to see that there is no overt leaning anywhere. If, however, we are to assume that he means only the social science research, then it should also be an apples-to-apples comparison with media research and Google Research, which is obviously a touch nonsensical.</p>
<p>(Let&rsquo;s also leave alone the idea that political philosophy&mdash;one of those &ldquo;liberal arts&rdquo; that I think he implies by the use of the term &ldquo;social sciences&rdquo;&mdash;is what&rsquo;s being discussed every day on various websites and Twitter, and just as obviously not leaning in any particular direction.)</p>
<p>Neither does the media lean strongly in one direction&mdash;in fact, it&rsquo;s long been known among those who&rsquo;ve studied the political bias in newspapers over the last century that many/most reporters tend to lean left, while many/most editors tend to lean right. This was widely considered positive, as it leant a degree of balance to the newspapers&rsquo; reporting. Recent developments (over the last decade) in &ldquo;fake news&rdquo; and clearly-defined political bias (FOX News, MSNBC) have clearly upset that particular apple cart, but for the most part, traditionally high-ethic journalistic channels (New York Times, Washington Post, etc) have sought to maintain that balance, their Op-Ed sections notwithstanding.</p>
<p>If we broaden the term &ldquo;media&rdquo; to include &ldquo;anybody who can stand up a website&rdquo;, which obviously could potentially include sites like Breitbart and Stormfront, then it should be patently obvious that the political leaning of &ldquo;the media&rdquo; is actually not leaning in any one particular direction at all.</p>
<h3 id="falsification-doctrine:3fa174188fcb08674214e2904aec3bc4">Falsification Doctrine</h3>
<p>One of the best ways in which one can test one&rsquo;s own hypothesis is to conduct what Karl Popper called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsificationism">&ldquo;falsificationism&rdquo;</a>, whereby one actively seeks to disprove one&rsquo;s assertion. To Popper, this was the critical distinction between science and pseudoscience:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Popper stresses the problem of demarcation—&ndash;distinguishing the scientific from the unscientific—&ndash;and makes falsifiability the demarcation criterion, such that what is unfalsifiable is classified as unscientific, and the practice of declaring an unfalsifiable theory to be scientifically true is pseudoscience. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability">Falsifiability</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>For example, upon observing a white swan, an amateur at logic may suggest that &ldquo;That swan is white&rdquo;. That is a statement of fact, what Popper called a &ldquo;singular existential statement&rdquo;, since it makes a statement about the universe that can be verified by examining the evidence suggested. Upon observing a second and third and fourth swan, all of which are white, it may lead the amateur to conclude &ldquo;All swans are white&rdquo;. However, this is a statement that now suggests that there is no such thing as a black swan&mdash;proven incorrect as soon as a black swan is observed, which can only happen by continued observation and research. As a matter of fact, the only way that statement could ever be verified true is by finding all swans in the universe (including those not on planet Earth), observing their color, and documenting that they are, in fact, white. This is obviously a great deal of work, which most amateurs refuse to conduct. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve observed four swans, that seems like a sufficient set of data points from which to conclude, so clearly my observations are reflective of the universe.&rdquo; (Most statisticians would probably refute that point quite strongly.)</p>
<p>Instead of trying to observe all swans, taking the opposite approach&mdash;embracing a doctrine of falsification and seeking to observe or discover evidence that would render the statement incorrect&mdash;is often far more effective and efficient.</p>
<h3 id="conclusions:3fa174188fcb08674214e2904aec3bc4">Conclusions</h3>
<p>Google-bro&rsquo;s memo is a perfect example of an opportunity to refuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Discarding the ridiculous elements of his memo, we are still left with the very relevant and important question of, &ldquo;Do people at Google of right-leaning political viewpoints feel psychologically safe in airing their views out at company events and forums?&rdquo; Note the deliberate phrasing of my question: if we assume that Google is a left-leaning company (which seems reasonable) and that the left-leaning individuals are thus more comfortable airing their views out, the question should be whether those of the opposite side of the political spectrum feel the same way.</p>
<p>This question, by the way, is one that should be asked at every company.</p>
<p>In this particular case, if Google wants to assert that their company culture is &ldquo;psychologically safe&rdquo;, then the right question for Google to ask is, &ldquo;How many people here feel *un*safe rendering their views in an open forum?&rdquo; Note that this doesn&rsquo;t mean that anybody at Google should feel open about sharing views that are openly hostile or threatening; the company bears a direct responsibility to ensure that all of its employees are physically safe before considering their psychological safety. But they have a responsibility to ensure that the safety extends to both sides of the political spectrum.</p>
<p>And, bear in mind, that does not mean Google now has an obligation to ensure &ldquo;equal air time&rdquo; or &ldquo;equal support&rdquo; of all causes. As the executors of the company, Google executives are permitted to choose to pour company resources into whatever charitable or political causes they feel best benefit the company. In many cases, that means that firms will make campaign contributions to the electoral campaigns of candidates from both sides simultaneously, for example.</p>
Speaking Tips: Don't Be Funnyhttp://blogs.tedneward.com/post/speaking-tips-dont-be-funny/
Sat, 28 Jan 2017 23:12:31 -0800http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/speaking-tips-dont-be-funny/
<p>For many years, I&rsquo;ve quietly mentored a few speakers in the industry.
Nothing big, nothing formal, just periodically I&rsquo;d find somebody that
wanted to get in front of audiences and speak, and either they&rsquo;d ask
me some questions or I&rsquo;d get the feeling that they were open to some
suggestions, and things would sort of go from there. Now, as I start
to wind down my speaking career (some), I thought I&rsquo;d post some ideas
and suggestions I&rsquo;ve had over the years.</p>
<p>This time, it&rsquo;s about humor. Or the lack thereof.</p>
<p>Recently, I watched a presentation by a speaker (nobody I will name, to
protect the guilty) who tried&mdash;oh, so very hard, he tried&mdash;to be funny.
But his jokes just weren&rsquo;t landing with his audience, and he grew visibly
more and more nervous with every bombing joke, until finally he either
ran out of material or ran out of courage, finished his talk, and bolted
for the door as soon as he could.</p>
<p>It was really a painful process for everybody.</p>
<p>Which leads me to my next speaking tip: Don&rsquo;t be funny.</p>
<p>Or, rather: Don&rsquo;t be funny, unless you know how to be funny, and by
that I mean you have actually studied how to be funny.</p>
<h2 id="don-t-quit-your-day-job:26842f3c10934f227796aa7da8a93fe5">Don&rsquo;t quit your day job</h2>
<p>It&rsquo;s a hidden desire we all (or many, anyway) have: to be standing in
a group of laughing people, tossing off quip after quip, telling story
after story, to peals of laughter and amusement. To be funny, it seems,
is so easy&mdash;just find the right jokes, toss off the right comments at
the right time, and lo-and-behold, everybody laughs, and who doesn&rsquo;t
love somebody that makes you laugh?</p>
<p>(Matter of fact, remember, we learned that lesson in <em>Aladdin</em>? Genie
tried to tell Aladdin to reveal his true identity to Princess Jasmine
because &ldquo;A woman loves a man who can make her laugh!&rdquo; He refused, of
course, and ended up having to out-trick the Vizier/sorceror/evil-genie
at the end of the movie instead. Shoulda run with the Genie&rsquo;s advice,
Al!)</p>
<p>Unfortunately, when the would-be comedian tries to be funny, it often
backfires horribly, with what seemed so funny when you told that joke
among your friends last week instead just draws blank stares from the
room. Yikes! Maybe they just didn&rsquo;t hear it, so you try the punchline
again. Nothing. Hmm. OK, let&rsquo;s try one more&hellip;.</p>
<p>That gurgling sound you hear in the background is the sound of a talk,
going down, for the final time. Or, in some cases, it&rsquo;s drowned out
by the &ldquo;whooshing&rdquo; sound of flames erupting in the back from somebody
who really did not care for the supposed joke, because it wasn&rsquo;t really
all that funny, and in fact it was downright offensive.</p>
<p>I know: You want to be funny. You really, really want to entertain the
audience as much as educate them, and that&rsquo;s a good thing, generally.
(Actually, it&rsquo;s almost always a good thing&mdash;if it can be done well.)
But, like many things speaking-related, it&rsquo;s never as easy as it seems
on the surface, and if you&rsquo;re committed to a speaker persona of one
who will make the room laugh, then you need to commit to learning the
&ldquo;science&rdquo; of being funny.</p>
<h3 id="being-funny-is-no-joking-matter:26842f3c10934f227796aa7da8a93fe5">Being funny is no joking matter</h3>
<p>No, seriously&mdash;you think standup comedians are funny by accident? Or
that they&rsquo;re just somehow more talented? No way. They practice, and I
don&rsquo;t mean with their friends. The funny people actually go out and
practice their jokes on strangers. Many of the world&rsquo;s funniest comedians
continue to do stand-up in small, out-of-the-way clubs, where they
can try their newest material, judge the results, and tweak it (the
material, the delivery, the pacing, whatever) in time for the next
show. In fact, some of them will even play around with the material
during their &ldquo;big&rdquo; shows (in Vegas, for example), because nobody
ever goes to the same stand-up comedian&rsquo;s show twice in a row, right?</p>
<p>Let me be entirely transparent with you&mdash;a few years ago, I had a
small accident while I was in Riga to do the keynote at the first
RigaDevDays show. The full story is <a href="http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/a-latvian-tale/">here</a>
if you want to read it. The admission of honesty comes in the fact
that by the time I wrote all that down, I had my &ldquo;story&rdquo; (that is
to say, the entire joke, all however-many-pages of it) down to a
near-science. I knew exactly where I wanted to pause for breath,
where I wanted to pause for effect (to let people either relax
before the next big moment of tension, or to help build the suspense
back up, and so on. I wouldn&rsquo;t call it memorized, but it was damn
close.</p>
<p>Why? Well, partly because it&rsquo;s kinda funny, and partly because it&rsquo;s
a way to help defuse what could&rsquo;ve been a really sad story into
something that we can all enjoy. (I mean, seriously, I had a shard
of bone broken off from my upper right arm while I was abroad in
a country whose language I spoke not one word of. There&rsquo;s some
horror stories that start that way.)</p>
<p>But the more salient question is, How? How did I get it to the point
where, if I tell it just right, I have people laughing so hard they
have tears coming out of their eyes? Easy: I practiced it. Over and
over again, watching their body language, watching how they paid
attention at parts and sort of &ldquo;wandered off&rdquo; at points. (Keep the
former, speed up through the latter.) The first time I told it, it
was much more factually-driven; now, it&rsquo;s all about getting to the
punch lines, after suitable build-up.</p>
<p>How does one get to be the funniest person in the room? Practice,
practice, practice.</p>
<p>Want to know something else? While most of the world finds Venkat
Subramaniam to be an incredibly funny speaker, I don&rsquo;t. Not because
I don&rsquo;t like the guy&mdash;far from it, he&rsquo;s one of my closest friends
in the world. I don&rsquo;t find him funny for the same reason that his
kids don&rsquo;t find him funny (or why my kids don&rsquo;t find me all that
funny): I&rsquo;ve heard all his jokes before. He&rsquo;s practiced, just as
I have, year over year, and discovered (as I have!) that sometimes
the joke you didn&rsquo;t intend is actually the funniest joke.</p>
<h3 id="some-basics-of-humor:26842f3c10934f227796aa7da8a93fe5">Some basics of humor</h3>
<p>So assuming I haven&rsquo;t turned you off of attempting humor in your
presentation entirely, let me leave you with a few tidbits on what
being funny really means.</p>
<p>Let me start with an example; suppose I walk up to you at a conference
and say, &ldquo;What did one programmer say to the other? Byte me!&rdquo;,
chances are good that you&rsquo;re going to just kind of sit there and
look at me and wonder what the hell I&rsquo;m doing. It&rsquo;s just not that
funny. Why?</p>
<ul>
<li><p><strong><em>Most humor is rooted in truth.</em></strong> Frankly, the funnier jokes
are the ones that have some basis in reality, and particularly,
a reality that is shared and felt closely by its audience. The
classic stand-up line, &ldquo;Take my wife&hellip;. please!&rdquo; only worked in
the Vaudeville world, where &ldquo;Take my (whatever)&rdquo; was a common
and classic opening line to a bit, and it only worked in audiences
where husband-wife tension was all-too-common. It doesn&rsquo;t work
all that well today largely because neither of those two things
is really all that common anymore. &ldquo;Byte me&rdquo; doesn&rsquo;t work because
while we do deal in bytes all the time, we don&rsquo;t see the spelling
of it out loud, and the context here isn&rsquo;t obvious so as to
recognize the antonym.</p></li>
<li><p><strong><em>Most humor relies on surprise and/or a &ldquo;twist&rdquo;.</em></strong> Consider
the classic joke, &ldquo;Why did the chicken cross the road? To get
to the other side!&rdquo; Or my sister&rsquo;s favorite joke when she was
about five years old (through about 15 or so&mdash;she loved this one
looooong after it was funny): &ldquo;Why did the elephant stand on the
marshmallow? So he wouldn&rsquo;t fall into the hot chocolate!&rdquo; Both
of these jokes rely on the &ldquo;twist&rdquo;, the surprise that comes out
of nowhere, relying on some tangential angle of the word or
phrase or situation that isn&rsquo;t where we expect the joke to go.
&ldquo;Byte me&rdquo; works maybe a little bit here, in that we don&rsquo;t expect
programmers to be hostile when they just walk up to each other,
and &ldquo;Bite me!&rdquo;, the word play starting point, is pretty obviously
a confrontational phrase.</p></li>
<li><p><strong><em>Humor can also rely on a surprise interpretation of the normal.</em></strong>
Consider a classic: &ldquo;How many (whatever)s does it take to
change a light bulb?&rdquo; Here, the &ldquo;twist&rdquo; is that we&rsquo;re going to
interpret something about this everyday situation differently.
Such as:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong><em>Actors</em></strong> &ldquo;Only one. They don&rsquo;t like to share the spotlight.&rdquo;</li>
<li><strong><em>Feminists</em></strong> &ldquo;One! And it&rsquo;s not funny!&rdquo;</li>
<li><strong><em>Software developer</em></strong> &ldquo;None; the lights are fine here on my machine!&rdquo;</li>
<li><strong><em>Armies</em></strong> &ldquo;At least five. The Germans to start it, the French to give up really easily after only trying for a little while, the Italians to make a start, get nowhere, and then try again from the other side, the Americans to turn up late and finish it off and take all the credit, and the Swiss to pretend nothing out of the ordinary is happening.&rdquo;</li>
<li><strong><em>Psychologist</em></strong> &ldquo;One, but the light bulb really has to want to change.&rdquo;</li>
<li><strong><em>Administrative assistants</em></strong> &ldquo;None. I can&rsquo;t do anything unless you complete a lightbulb design change request form.&rdquo;</li>
<li><strong><em>Technical support</em></strong> &ldquo;None; we just need to reboot the room.&rdquo;</li>
<li><strong><em>Consultants</em></strong> &ldquo;That&rsquo;s in our 2017 Report, &lsquo;Light Bulbs of 2017&rsquo; and is available for download for USD$1.995&hellip;&rdquo;
and so on. In each case, we take their stereotypical behavior and
apply it somehow to the situation at hand. And notice how the joke is
built off of the stereotypical behavior&mdash;that&rsquo;s the seed of the
&ldquo;truth&rdquo; that makes the joke funny.</li>
</ul></li>
<li><p><strong><em>Never laugh first at your own joke.</em></strong> This is just awkward. If you
can&rsquo;t keep yourself from laughing at the punchline that&rsquo;s in your head
before you tell it, you should abandon humor as a mechanic immediately.
Seriously. Nobody, and I mean <strong><em>nobody</em></strong> finds funny the person who
laughs at their own jokes first.</p></li>
<li><p><strong><em>Much humor is in the timing, body language, and tone.</em></strong> If you
are not comfortable with these three things, you will have a very hard
time being funny in front of a crowd. These, far more than the actual
words used, are what convey humor. In fact, sometimes the funniest
moments can come when you, the humorist, say little to nothing at all.
Consider: A student walks late into my class, apologizing, and says,
&ldquo;Sorry I&rsquo;m late, the rain made traffic a mess of the roads today.&rdquo;
At that exact moment, a shaft of sunshine streams down through the
window and bathes the floor in front of him in warm, beautiful light.
I don&rsquo;t even have to say anything&mdash;I just pointedly look at the floor,
then back at him, then back at the floor, then back at him, then at
the floor again&hellip;.. By this time, the room is giggling, because they
can see where this is going. Quirk an eyebrow at the student, make
eye contact for a few seconds, then slowly turn back to the projector,
and just move on with the lecture. Not a word, but the room gets the
joke.</p></li>
<li><p><strong><em>There&rsquo;s two kinds of humor: Routine, and &ldquo;organic.&rdquo;</em></strong> Routine is
your practiced material. &ldquo;Organic&rdquo; is what the standup comedians use
when they pick up on things that are happening during their time on
the stage. (This is when the comedian will point at somebody and say,
&ldquo;Hi, who are you, where are you from&rdquo; and then use that as the source
material for a short bit.) The best comedians will often incorporate
some of both into their performance, and certainly presenters can do
so as well. A number of years ago, I was doing a session in St Louis,
and cracked a joke which one of the audience members found funny.
And she had one of the loudest, most room-filling laughs you&rsquo;ve ever
heard. I commented on it, too: &ldquo;Wow, that&rsquo;s like the most obnoxious
laugh I think I&rsquo;ve ever run across. And I do this show every year in
thirty cities all over the country.&rdquo; She&mdash;and the rest of the room
too&mdash;found that hilarious, and from that point forward, every time
she laughed, the room got a double-dose of laughter, from those who
found whatever-I&rsquo;d-just-said to be funny, and from those who found
her laugh funny.</p></li>
<li><p><strong><em>Laughter is contagious, but it has an incubation period.</em></strong> Most
people attending a technical talk don&rsquo;t expect a speaker to be funny.
You will frequently need to &ldquo;seed&rdquo; the room early with humor (much
of which will fall flat, by the way) if you are going to get them to
laugh. Every quarter, when I teach a class at UW, the first week or
two is a little rough&mdash;the students aren&rsquo;t expecting an instructor
who is actively looking to work humor into the material, and many of
the jokes either bypass them completely or a few will get the joke
and smile, but not laugh. There&rsquo;s a point, however, where one or two
will giggle or make some sort of audible noise, and that essentially
breaks the surface tension of the room&mdash;after that, the laughs can
come more freely. This is why stand-up clubs put their worst/newest
comedians on first, on the grounds that these folks will &ldquo;warm up&rdquo;
the room (no matter how bad they are), and then graduating in skill
until by the time you get to the headliner, the room has laughed a
fair amount, and is fully &ldquo;primed&rdquo; and ready to go. In a presentation,
you will have to do this work yourself, and it&rsquo;s often a good idea
to find little ways to inject humor into your pre-talk routine;
sometimes I will fire up a text editor and make comments to the
audience through the text editor while I&rsquo;m being introduced or
before the talk begins. The people in the room can see it, they&rsquo;ll
laugh or giggle, and that will draw more eyes up to the front, and
so on. More to the point, it gets them a little &ldquo;warmed up&rdquo; to the
idea that this is not going to be dry and boring.</p></li>
<li><p><strong><em>Try a few improvisation classes.</em></strong> No matter where you live, there&rsquo;s
someplace nearby that offers a class on improv comedy. (Like, real improv,
where audience members shout out suggestions for the troupe to use to
make funny.) Take a few. There&rsquo;s a lot of tricks and tactics that you
can use to recognize organically-funny moments and leverage them.</p></li>
<li><p><strong><em>Be ready to accept the consequences of failure.</em></strong> If you aim to be
funny, and you alienate a portion of your audience, it can go very,
very badly for you. (See Neward, Ted, and Keynotes, CodeMash, 2012.)
Be ready to accept that as a consequence, and never, never try to
use &ldquo;But I was trying to be funny! It was just intended as a joke!&rdquo;
as an excuse. If you offend, you offend, and you owe an apology. If
you are not ready to admit that your attempts at humor didn&rsquo;t go over
well with some percentage of the audience (no matter how large or
small), then you should not attempt humor. Period.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Let me leave you with a story. This isn&rsquo;t exactly how I&rsquo;d tell it were
I trying to be humorous with it; it&rsquo;s far more instructive as an example
of something that was funny but entirely inside of a particular context.</p>
<h2 id="that-time-in-poland:26842f3c10934f227796aa7da8a93fe5">That time, in Poland&hellip;</h2>
<p>A number of years ago, I was doing a conference in Krakow, Poland. I
was there with Linda Rising, Michael Nygard, and Venkat Subramaniam,
among others. (The reason I mention these three names is that they&rsquo;re
relevant to the story&mdash;the others are not.)</p>
<p>Mike, Venkat and I were scheduled to do closing keynotes. Yes, keynotes,
plural&mdash;while there was a few tracks for breakout sessions, the organizers
had decided that they wanted to have a single track in the afternoon of the
closing day, and Mike, Venkat and I, in that order, were it.</p>
<p>This was actually in balance to the previous day, which had offered a pair
of opening keynotes, one by Linda Rising, who was the victim of some
unfortunate misunderstandings. You see, this was Linda&rsquo;s first time in
Poland, and she was trying to build some rapport with the audience by
periodically asking her audience, &ldquo;Do you have those in Poland?&rdquo;
Unfortunately, judging by the Twitter stream during her keynote, the effect
was much the opposite of what she&rsquo;d intended&mdash;many of the attendees were
a little (to a lot) offended by her questions, as they felt that somehow
this was making them out to be some backwards Third World nation or
something.</p>
<p>For closing keynotes, Mike did his thing, and the audience was awed by
his analysis. Possibly a little OVERawed&mdash;they were polite in their
applause, but it was a litlte muted.</p>
<p>(Establishing a baseline here: the audience is engaged, but they certainly
weren&rsquo;t jumping out of their seats with energy.)</p>
<p>Then, Venkat stood up and did his thing. And oh, man, did he wake up the
crowd. They laughed at his jokes, they grinned at his commentary, and they
even chuckled at a few things that he really hadn&rsquo;t intended to be funny
at all. I remember one time he was talking something about the Java type
system, and he pointed at the screen and mock-shouted, &ldquo;That&rsquo;s not a String!&rdquo;
and the audience howled. I have no idea why they found that so funny, but
man, they did.</p>
<p>So now it&rsquo;s my turn. (Thinking to myself, &ldquo;Jesus, Venkat, why&rsquo;d you have to
be so funny? Now I&rsquo;m only going to look terrible by comparison!&ldquo;, I was about
to begin. Suddenly inspiration struck.)</p>
<p>&ldquo;Before I get started, let me tell you a story,&rdquo; I began. &ldquo;When I was in
high school, I used to play trombone in a jazz band. One of the fundamental
rules was that you never want to solo after the saxophone player does a
solo. The saxophone is just such a sexy instrument, anything that guy plays
is going to sound better than anything you could possibly do. So, thank you,
Venkat &lsquo;Saxophone&rsquo; Subramaniam, for your keynote, and&hellip;.&rdquo; The room laughs.</p>
<p>(I figured that would be the highlight; I was wrong. WAY wrong.)</p>
<p>At a certain point in the talk, I start asking the audience
some simple questions. One of them is a fairly simple math problem about
calculating the dimensions of a rectangle, using a farmer&rsquo;s farm as the
rectangle in question. (Knowing the difficulties Linda had accidentally
had with this crowd, I went in with this next bit entirely in mind.)</p>
<p>&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s try another problem. Here we see that we need to discover the
dimensions to a rectangular area. So imagine a farmer needs to caculate
the dimensions of his farm&hellip;. Oh, wait, do you have farms in Poland?&rdquo;</p>
<p>The room giggled a little&mdash;they could tell where I was coming from with
that&mdash;but from the back of the room, a heckler cries out, &ldquo;Not a square
farm, no!&rdquo; The room laughs a little more.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, right, sorry. So, imagine a GERMAN farmer has a farm&hellip;.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The room explodes. Falls out of its collective chair, laughing so hard.
From that point forward, I had them laughing just by affecting a German
accent every once in a while.</p>
<p>Best. Keynote. EVAR.</p>
<h3 id="analysis:26842f3c10934f227796aa7da8a93fe5">Analysis</h3>
<p>Mike Nygard, after the talk, said he absolutely could not believe what
I had just done. &ldquo;There is no way that should&rsquo;ve worked,&rdquo; I think was how
he phrased it. &ldquo;You just insulted every German in the room, and the whole
audience thought it was hilarious!&rdquo;</p>
<p>First of all, there weren&rsquo;t that many Germans in the room; this was in
Poland, and frankly, Europeans don&rsquo;t seem all that willing to cross
national lines when they attend conferences. Not sure why, since almost
all technical software development conferences seem to be done in English
regardless of where they&rsquo;re held, but that&rsquo;s only tangential to the story.
Fact is, there probably were a few Germans in the audience, and they
laughed alongside their Polish counterparts.</p>
<p>Thing is, by taking Linda&rsquo;s accident of the day prior, I really had only
intended to try and &ldquo;rescue&rdquo; that particular situation by making a little
humor out of it by taking it to more and more absurd lengths. Of course
Poland has farms&mdash;every country in Europe has had farms since roughly
the Stone Age. It was a tacit acknowledgement that some of the prior day&rsquo;s
interaction was a little silly, by going even sillier and over-the-top.
I was deliberately exaggerating and going out to the absurd end of the
spectrum to try and draw a laugh.</p>
<p>But the GERMAN crack, totally ad-libbed, was the <em>coup de grace</em>. In one
word, I&rsquo;d effectively played on the historical (and to a much lesser degree
current) tensions between two rivals, Poland and Germany, by playing on
the stereotype of the &ldquo;engineer German&rdquo; whose farms are, of course, always
perfectly straight and perfectly rectangular, because that&rsquo;s how we do
farms in Germany!</p>
<p>(&ldquo;How many Germans does it take to change a light bulb? Ein! Was ist zo
funny?&ldquo;)</p>
<p>If you&rsquo;re in Europe, you can always fall back on national stereotypes
as a source of humor. Kinda like redneck jokes in the US.</p>
<p>(&ldquo;HEAVEN is where: The police are British, the chefs Italian, the mechanics are German, the lovers are French and it&rsquo;s all organised by the Swiss.
&ldquo;HELL is where: The police are German, the chefs are British, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss and it&rsquo;s all organised by the Italians!!&ldquo;)</p>
<h2 id="summary:26842f3c10934f227796aa7da8a93fe5">Summary</h2>
<p>If you&rsquo;re going to work humor into your talks, make sure you can be funny
in other situations, among people who are not familiar with you or with
your usual repertoire of jokes. If you can&rsquo;t make others beyond your closest
social circle laugh, then you need to work on your humor skills some more.
Here&rsquo;s homework: Go watch a standup routine, but instead of enjoying the
routine, try to analyze the jokes and discover what makes them funny.
What bits worked? What bits didn&rsquo;t? Then, take a class on comedy, either
standup or improv, and try your own hand at it.</p>
<p>And if you get good at it, well, maybe you can quit your day job.</p>
Speaking Tips: Managing T&Ehttp://blogs.tedneward.com/post/speaking-tips-travel-expenses/
Wed, 18 Jan 2017 21:27:31 -0800http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/speaking-tips-travel-expenses/
<p>For many years, I&rsquo;ve quietly mentored a few speakers in the industry.
Nothing big, nothing formal, just periodically I&rsquo;d find somebody that
wanted to get in front of audiences and speak, and either they&rsquo;d ask
me some questions or I&rsquo;d get the feeling that they were open to some
suggestions, and things would sort of go from there. Now, as I start
to wind down my speaking career (some), I thought I&rsquo;d post some ideas
and suggestions I&rsquo;ve had over the years.</p>
<p>Recently I got an email from a blog reader, Krzysztof, asking me a
question specific to speaking, so I figured I&rsquo;d just use his question
as the spine of the next Speaking Tips. Quoting him, he wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have also been presenting recently at several conferences and these
were quite successful performances (very highly voted). I would like
to continue that and I have beed invited already to several places.
The concern I have are the cost of travel and accomodation. I feel
strange asking my boss again and again to pay that for me. He has
agreed every time up to now but I dont feel this is how it should work,
especially if I plan to do it much more. If it is not a secrect, could
you share some thoughts about it?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In some ways, there&rsquo;s two questions here&mdash;one is the question of whether
it&rsquo;s acceptable to speak on your employers&rsquo; time, and the second is how
to get conferences to cover your T&amp;E (travel and expenses).</p>
<h3 id="when-work-speaks:ec597cde7f42c8585a8a7d6c4aec4333">When work speaks</h3>
<p>Whether a company should cover an employee&rsquo;s T&amp;E for a conference
really has no universal answer, and frankly, I don&rsquo;t think there should
be one, either. On the one hand, certainly the company derives some
direct and indirect benefits from an employee going out into the world
and speaking at conferences; namely</p>
<ul>
<li><p><strong><em>Increased visibility.</em></strong> When you speak, if your title slide has
your company name and website, you are implicitly saying &ldquo;Hey, these
folks are cool and if you want to work with cool kids like me, put in
an application.&rdquo; That&rsquo;s definitely a good thing for them. Unfortunately,
it&rsquo;s also damnably hard to track the success factor here in any sort of
reasonable quantitative way&mdash;so don&rsquo;t expect that your company is going
to even realize that they&rsquo;re getting that additional mojo unless
something really unusual (like your talk going viral) happens. This is
doubly hard for companies that aren&rsquo;t in the developer tools space.</p></li>
<li><p><strong><em>Increased technical skills.</em></strong> The old adage states, &ldquo;You never know
a thing half as well until you try to teach it.&rdquo; Even if you think you
know a subject pretty well, trying to teach it&mdash;and trying to anticipate
the questions you&rsquo;ll get, not to mention the questions you never thought
to anticipate and find yourself stumped by&mdash;will give you a much deeper
skillset around that thing than you would ever have had just using it.
This is sometimes directly obvious, but often management at work will
attribute it to causes that may or may not be actual. (Let&rsquo;s face it,
it&rsquo;s a hard sell to suggest that the <em>only</em> reason you got smarter on the
subject is because you spoke on it, since you&rsquo;re doing things every day
that all could&mdash;and probably would&mdash;contribute to your comprehension
of the subject, too.)</p></li>
<li><p><strong><em>Increased communication.</em></strong> In addition to sharpening your technical skills,
giving presentations also increases your communication skills, and that
can have direct benefits to the company as well. Having a technical
individual who can stand in front of customers and/or their IT staff
can be the difference between closing the million-dollar deal and
the Sales staff blaming the crappy documentation again and demanding
better leads from Marketing. But again, this is hard to quantify, and
if the rest of the company doesn&rsquo;t know you&rsquo;re giving these talks and
utilizes you in these situations, again, there&rsquo;s no direct way for them
to see the benefit of your talks.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>If you&rsquo;re starting to get the impression that maybe your employer doesn&rsquo;t
really have a reason to encourage and support your speaking career, that&rsquo;s
not quite the message&mdash;the message here is that your employer will have a
hard time <em>realizing what those reasons are</em>. That means it&rsquo;s on you to
make those reasons clear if you want your employer to be more active in
supporting you to speak: Suggest that you could do &ldquo;brown bag&rdquo; sessions
at lunch, suggest that you could bring a company recruiter with you to
the events, and so on. Find a reason that makes it compelling for the
company to not only &ldquo;tolerate&rdquo; your conference engagements, but actively
&ldquo;wins&rdquo; when you do them.</p>
<p>That way, you&rsquo;re not feeling so guilty about going out into the world
and speaking.</p>
<h2 id="when-conferences-call:ec597cde7f42c8585a8a7d6c4aec4333">When conferences call</h2>
<p>But that&rsquo;s actually not the main issue. While companies are sometimes willing
to allow an employee some &ldquo;working remote&rdquo; time to go speak at a conference
somewhere, &lsquo;tis the rare company indeed that is willing to foot the bill
for said employee to do the same thing.</p>
<p>The only notable exceptions to this
rule, of course, are those employees who are <em>paid</em> to do this very thing:
the various &ldquo;developer evangelists&rdquo;, &ldquo;developer advocates&rdquo;, &ldquo;technical
sales support&rdquo; and the other titles we give to people working in the field
of Developer Relations. If you have or want to have one of those jobs, the
questin is already answered&mdash;the company hired you with the expectation that
you were going to go out and speak, and all of your airfare, hotel, car,
meals, and sometimes even your entertainment expenses fall under the large
umbrella of &ldquo;reimbursable expenses&rdquo;, and your next step is to find out how
your company&rsquo;s expense reporting system works.</p>
<p>For everybody else who&rsquo;s not a DE, it&rsquo;s reasonable to assume that the
company doesn&rsquo;t want to cover your T&amp;E. And, let&rsquo;s be honest, neither do
you&mdash;airfare and hotel and meals and all that can get really expensive,
particularly on an individual developer&rsquo;s salary. So how do you get
conferences to cover for it?</p>
<p>There&rsquo;s a couple of things to keep in mind:</p>
<p>First, <strong><em>you should never have to pay for the privilege of speaking.</em></strong>
You are &ldquo;paying&rdquo; for it already in terms of your preparation time, your
travel time, and the session delivery time. Not sure what that adds up to?
Take your annual salary, divide it by 2000 (there are 2000 working hours
in the year, assuming a 40-hour work week and 2 weeks of vacation), and
now you have your hourly rate. Now add up all the time you spend thinking,
slide-smithing, practicing, slide refactoring, demo coding, and so on.</p>
<p>This is a non-trivial expense on your part already, even without considering
any other out-of-pocket expense.</p>
<p>However, having said that, <strong><em>you never get what you never ask for.</em></strong>
Believe me, conferences are not unaware of the expenses involved in coming
to their venue to speak, and in many cases, they will not be the one to
raise the subject with you because if you don&rsquo;t ask, well, it must not be
something you need to worry about, right? <em>wink</em> You must be in one of those
jobs that your company&rsquo;s willing to pay for it, right? <em>wink</em> And, c&rsquo;mon,
developers get paid a lot of money, so you can cover it yourself, right?
<em>wink</em></p>
<p>All that winking starts to form a nervous habit after a while.</p>
<p>Don&rsquo;t get me wrong, not all conferences will play this little
passive-aggressive game. Many of them are very up-front and forthright about
the subject, and will simply state their policy right away. Others, however,
particularly the smaller/regional events, are operating on a shoestring
budget and simply can&rsquo;t afford to cover every speakers&rsquo; T&amp;E.</p>
<p>(Side note: frankly, part of this is because conferences are often very
stupid. Opt for a lower number of speakers, ask each speaker to do two or
three talks instead of just one, and they would find that they would be
amortizing the cost of each speaker across a higher number of talks, and
thus overall reduce their expenses on this front. However, many conferences
consider their show to be only partly professional event, the rest being a
social event, and thus have rather idiotic policies like &ldquo;one talk per
speaker&rdquo;, effectively <em>maximizing</em> the amount of expenses they have to
cover per speaker. NDC London does this, for example. Yes, I understand
that a conference might get several hundred speakers applying to speak, but
there is no &ldquo;rule&rdquo; stating that it is a conference&rsquo;s sworn mission in life
to get as many people to visit London on the conference&rsquo;s dime. Ask each
speaker to do two sessions, instead of one, and you&rsquo;ve effectively halved
your T&amp;E budget. If you really want to get a wide variety of people through
the show, rotate the speakers around every year or so.)</p>
<p>Which then brings us to the next point: <strong><em>your chances of getting your T&amp;E
covered go up appreciably with every conference invite you get.</em></strong> In other
words, if they want you, you&rsquo;re in a much stronger negotiating position; if,
on the other hand, you came to them with a proposal through their CFP
process and they sent you an acceptance, asking them to cover your T&amp;E is
a pretty weak negotiating position.</p>
<p>Once you&rsquo;re in the position of negotiating, however, now you&rsquo;re in a
slightly different realm, and there are numerous resources out there on
how to negotiate well; I&rsquo;ll leave it to you to find those. The key is to
realize that if they invite you, you have more leverage than if you are
asking them to let you speak. (Some of this is how you view it internally;
as long as you see speaking as something that you would do for free because
you love it so much, you&rsquo;re never going to get your T&amp;E covered. Start
thinking about speaking as a professional commitment every bit as much
as you think about writing code, and you&rsquo;ll start thinking about it more
as a business and less as a &ldquo;passion&rdquo;.)</p>
<h2 id="contrived-example:ec597cde7f42c8585a8a7d6c4aec4333">Contrived example</h2>
<p>Here&rsquo;s a fictitious example of how it might go between myself and a
conference:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Con</strong>: Dear Ted; we&rsquo;ve enjoyed seeing you speak at other events, and we
would like to invite you to come speak at our event CodeCon in Blarfeny,
Oorah, in August of this year.</p>
<p><strong>Ted</strong>: Dear Con; thanks for the praise! I&rsquo;d love to speak at your event,
but before I make any commitments one way or another, I&rsquo;d like to know a
few facts about your show. How many attendees did you draw last year,
what&rsquo;s the speaker stipend like, and what&rsquo;s your T&amp;E policy?</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>(Notice that I&rsquo;m assuming the event has one; for me, as somebody who&rsquo;s been
speaking for close to two decades, any event that doesn&rsquo;t at least cover my
T&amp;E is a non-starter. Your mileage may vary, of course, depending on what
your personal goals are, but for me, this is a profession.)</em></p>
<p>Here&rsquo;s a couple of possible responses:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Con</strong>: Hi Ted, great to hear of your interest! Unfortunately, we are a
small conference as of yet, we drew about 500 attendees last year, and we
can&rsquo;t afford to cover all speakers&rsquo; T&amp;E. However, we do offer a free
conference pass to all speakers, and a great discounted rate at the hotel!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>&ldquo;Free conference pass&rdquo; is table stakes&mdash;that shouldn&rsquo;t even have to be said.
If I&rsquo;m speaking at your show, you&rsquo;re damn right I get a free conference pass,
otherwise how am I going to get in to the building to deliver the session?
What&rsquo;s more, if this is a conference of even a hundred attendees, they should
be getting some deep discounts on rooms for the organizers, and they could
include speakers in that block and cover the room themselves. This is a total
&ldquo;PASS&rdquo;, and I will send a politely-worded &ldquo;go jump off a cliff&rdquo; message in
return, at least until they get somebody running the show that&rsquo;s familiar with
how professional software development conferences are run.</p>
<p>(Fortunately, this
response is very rare&mdash;less than 1% of the shows I&rsquo;ve done have a policy like
this; however, one of the shows that had this policy was CodeMash in Ohio,
and they were drawing close to 2000 attendees and spending a ton of money on
a bacon bar, yet not even covering speakers&rsquo; hotel rooms. Hence our little
blog-feud of a few years ago. I don&rsquo;t know their current policy.)</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Con</strong>: Hi, Ted, great to hear of your interest! We are a small conference,
last year we got about 500 attendees, so we can cover some speakers&rsquo; T&amp;E,
but we ask that if you have a company that will cover your expenses, you do
that. We don&rsquo;t do speaker stipends, but we will pick up your hotel regardless.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is a much more common response; as a matter of fact, this and the next
one are probably 75% of all responses. I probably will still turn them down,
since, again, I am well too far into my profesional speaking career to be
paying for the privilege to speak, but I will at least counter-offer by
offering to do a handful of talks and/or a workshop if they can cover my
complete T&amp;E, and see what they say in response. If they agree, then we can
start talking about other policies; if they really &ldquo;don&rsquo;t have the money&rdquo;,
then I regretfully turn them down and ask them to contact me when the show
is on more solid financial footing.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Con</strong>: Hi, Ted, great to hear of your interest! We will cover all speakers&rsquo;
T&amp;E, including airfare and hotel, but we have no speaking stipend. We do,
however, do a profit-sharing with workshops, so if you want to do an all-day
workshop for us, we will split the revenues from the workshop by&hellip; (insert
whatever policy here). How does this sound?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is probably the most common response I get, particularly from conferences
overseas (meaning, in Europe). Here, I&rsquo;m still volunteering my time, but at
least it&rsquo;s not money out of my (or my employers&rsquo;) pocket. The workshop angle
is relatively new&mdash;I&rsquo;ve had it floated past me several times in the last two
years alone&mdash;but it&rsquo;s not a bad angle for both parties, and worth exploring.
In terms of decision-making for me, it often comes down to the conference&rsquo;s
location: is this in a city/country that I&rsquo;ve never visisted (and presumably
would like to), or is this in a place that I&rsquo;d like to visit again? Case in
point: Krakow (home of Devoxx Poland) is a flat-out gorgeous city, and as long
as my airfare and hotel are covered, I am totally ready to go. London,
Amsterdam, and a few other cities in Europe are on that short list, too.
Or, if this is a city where I have friends or family nearby, sure, I&rsquo;ll do it,
since now I can usually carve out an extra day or two (paying for the extra
day or two in the hotel myself of course, unless the conference wants to
pick it up, in which case I&rsquo;ll offer another session or something to try and
reward their generous nature) and get essentially a free friends/family visit
out of it.</p>
<p>The other thing I will sometimes do, if the conference is in a city that I
know my wife would like to visit, is see if they will pick up her airfare
to fly with me in exchange for doing a few more sessions or workshops. This
often works out well for both sides, since conferences can sometimes write off
speaker T&amp;E as an expense against their tax bill (reducing their income
footprint and overall tax burden), so picking up her airfare is actually much
cheaper than offering me a stipend; it&rsquo;s a double-win if they get a few more
sessions out of it.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Con</strong>: Hi Ted, great to hear of your interest! We don&rsquo;t cover T&amp;E, but
we offer every speaker a stipend of US$500/250/100/whatever to use against
their expenses and airfare. We will provide you with X number of nights in
the hotel.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is the policy I&rsquo;ve seen rarely, but it&rsquo;s actually not a bad policy; they&rsquo;re
essentially suggesting that if you want to burn frequent-flier miles in order
to maximize the money you make on the trip, that&rsquo;s your choice. It&rsquo;s also much
simpler for them in terms of budgeting, since now they just assume a flat rate
for each speaker. What they lose by doing this, however, is the opportunity
to choose speakers locally (who will cost a lot less) and end up possibly not
spending as much; it&rsquo;s a kind of price speculation. (Depending on the rate that
they&rsquo;re offering, it&rsquo;s also going to reduce the participation of speakers
further away, since US$500 will not get you very far towards Europe from
Seattle, for example; your money will run out somewhere over the Yukon in
Canada, and it&rsquo;s always awkward having to parachute out of the airplane when
that happens.)</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Con</strong>: Hi, Ted, great to hear of your interest. We cover speakers&rsquo; T&amp;E,
and our conference will be happy to book your air travel for you once we&rsquo;ve
determine your topics and such.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is one that a few conferences will do, but I personally don&rsquo;t like it; the
motivations of the individual booking the travel are not necessarily lined up with
my own. They will be looking to minimize the cost of the trip on whatever bargain
airline ticket price they can find, rather than thinking of the speaker&rsquo;s
comfort or the airline&rsquo;s reliability. I have backed out of speaking at a conference
within the last few years over this. (They wanted me to fly Air Iceland through
Reykjavik, in the middle of winter, because it was half the cost, as opposed to
my usual Seattle-to-Amsterdam leg that puts me in Europe.) The thing I will often
point out is that I have a travel agent, and he has all the information about me
already in his system, and more importantly, if anything goes wrong with the trip,
I can call him <sup>24</sup>&frasl;<sub>7</sub> and he will call airlines to find out the options and take
action to get me either to the conference or home again. When I ask conferences
if the person booking travel is offering to let me call them at 2AM to get a new
booking through a different city so I can get to my destination&mdash;at no cost to
me, of course&mdash;I usually get permission to use my own travel agent. As a policy
in the abstract, this one seems like a reasonable one, but having tried it a
few times, I simply won&rsquo;t go for it.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Con</strong>: Hi, Ted. We offer speakers a US$(whatever) stipend plus full T&amp;E, and if
you are interested in a workshop we will pay you US$(whatever).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Jackpot, baby! These are the shows you really want to keep hold of, because
they are pretty rare. Having said that, they also tend to be the most &ldquo;professional&rdquo;
of the lot, run by people who are actual professional event organizers. Almost
every show in this category has usually asked me for multiple sessions, and
in some cases deliberately arranged their conferences in two different countries
so that a speaker like myself coming from the US could speak at one, fly directly
to the other, speak, and then fly home, in essence setting up a &ldquo;two-for-one&rdquo;
in terms of speaking to expenses.</p>
<h2 id="your-policy:ec597cde7f42c8585a8a7d6c4aec4333">Your policy</h2>
<p>Frankly, as a speaker, you need to decide what your T&amp;E policy will be before
you start talking to conferences about it. You may be new enough in your speaking
career that you value the opportunities to practice speaking and/or the ability
to put &ldquo;Spoke at conference CodeCon in Oorah in Summer 2017&rdquo; on your resume
more than the cost of the flight to Oorah. That, my friend, is your call to make.
My context and circumstances are different than yours, as are my feelings around
travel and airports and so on.</p>
<p>I know of several different speakers&rsquo; policies, so let me sort of offer a few
here:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>&ldquo;I love giving back to the community.&rdquo; Usually this is the attitude of the
brand-new speaker, who&rsquo;s usually just speaking to local events that are within
driving distance. That&rsquo;s OK. Just understand that you&rsquo;re probably going to get
raked over the coals if you&rsquo;re thinkig of speaking a few airplane flights away;
at that point, you&rsquo;re probably going to give up speaking at anything further
than a car-ride away, or you&rsquo;re going to change your policy on T&amp;E.</p></li>
<li><p>&ldquo;I refuse to pay for the privilege of speaking.&rdquo; This is me, obviously, and
even then, I will tack on the secondary clause that I will only speak &ldquo;for free&rdquo;
in a city I want to visit or that has friends I want to see.</p></li>
<li><p>&ldquo;I refuse to pay for the privilege of speaking; I&rsquo;ll speak the first time at
your show &lsquo;for free&rsquo;, but after that, you know what you&rsquo;re getting and you should
be prepared to pay my speaking fees.&rdquo; One very well-known speaker/friend holds
to this policy, and frankly I think it&rsquo;s a great policy. The first time at a
given conference, you can argue that speaking there is an &ldquo;audition&rdquo;, to see
what the quality of the speaking product looks like, but if you invite hiim back
again, it&rsquo;s obvious that you liked what you saw, and you should be prepared to
pay market-rates for it.</p></li>
<li><p>&ldquo;I refuse to speak unless you cover my First-Class airfare, pay my speaking fees,
and you will need to organize a class that I can teach the week before/after.&rdquo;
Yes, sir, right away, sir, three bags full, sir! Not a fan of this policy, not
because I don&rsquo;t like First Class accomodations when flying overseas, but because
it definitely puts you out of the price range of most conferences that aren&rsquo;t
sponsored by major corporations (Microsoft, Oracle, Google, etc). What&rsquo;s more,
I don&rsquo;t care for the &ldquo;prima donna&rdquo; attitude that comes with it. Yes, I&rsquo;d love it
if a conference would want to spend that kind of money on me, but seriously,
I can live in Coach from Seattle to Amsterdam if it&rsquo;s sitting the Economy Comfort
section or there&rsquo;s an empty seat next to me. (Actually, for the kind of money
that a First-Class ticket would cost, I&rsquo;d rather you just paid for my wife&rsquo;s
airfare to ride next to me in Coach&mdash;which would probably be cheaper anyway.)</p></li>
</ul>
<p>You will often find things that really matter to you along the way that you want
to include as part of your &ldquo;travel package&rdquo; as you get more experience and comfort
speaking. For example, I&rsquo;ve found that if I&rsquo;m going to be at all comfortable with
speaking in Europe, I really need an extra day on the ground before the conference.
So if the show starts on the 10th, I&rsquo;ll look to leave Seattle on the 7th, arrive
on the 8th, and that way I have the 9th to get adjusted to local time before the
show starts on the 10th. Most conferences have been willing to accomodate this,
particularly when I point out that it gives us a little cushion in case something
goes wrong with the flight on the 7th/8th.</p>
<p>Oh, and I don&rsquo;t do red-eye flights anymore. I just can&rsquo;t do that anymore.</p>
<h2 id="summary:ec597cde7f42c8585a8a7d6c4aec4333">Summary</h2>
<p>It deserves to be said: Your mileage may vary. Just remember that T&amp;E is a bit
of a negotiation process, and that as in many negotiations, two sides are in a
bit of a &ldquo;win/lose&rdquo; relationship&mdash;every dollar they spend on your T&amp;E is a dollar
they can&rsquo;t spend elsewhere, or another dollar they have to raise through vendor
sponsorships or ticket sales. Sometimes you can use this knowledge to your
advantage as part of the negotiation, such as being willing to engage in some
promotional activities for them (videos, etc), or by offering to talk to your
company about sponsoring, or whatever else comes to mind.</p>
<p>But as with any negotiation, know what your &ldquo;bottom line&rdquo; is, and refuse to go
below it. Mine is, as I&rsquo;ve stated before, that full T&amp;E is non-negotiable, and
we go north from there. It means I&rsquo;ve missed opportunities to speak in some
really interesting locations (on the North Coast of Africa, for example), but
it also means that I&rsquo;ve never lost money on a show&mdash;only time.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
2017 Tech Predictionshttp://blogs.tedneward.com/post/2017-tech-predictions/
Mon, 02 Jan 2017 20:54:34 -0800http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/2017-tech-predictions/
<p>It&rsquo;s that time of the year again, when I make predictions for the upcoming year.
As has become my tradition now for nigh-on a decade, I will first go back over last years&rsquo;
predictions, to see how well I called it (and keep me honest), then wax prophetic on what I
think the new year has to offer us.</p>
<p>As per previous years, I&rsquo;m giving myself either a <strong>+1</strong> or a <strong>-1</strong> based on a
purely subjective and highly-biased evaluational criteria as to whether it actually happened
(or in some cases at least started to happen before 31 Dec 2016 ended).</p>
<p>Bear with me for a moment, though. This is just too good.</p>
<h2 id="in-2015:816dfc775e64d848cd23e6c10e386ae4">In 2015&hellip;</h2>
<p>&hellip; <a href="http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/2015-tech-predictions/">I said</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Microsoft acquires Xamarin.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Oh, baby. Off by a year. I&rsquo;m should go back and give myself a <strong>+1</strong> for this one. It was really
surprising that they hadn&rsquo;t. As a matter of fact, if Microsoft had listened to me and done it in
2015, they&rsquo;d probably have saved themselves a TON of money compared to what they actually paid for
Xamarin in 2016. But they made the acquisition, Xamarin is now part of the Microsoft family, and
(finally!) .NET developers have access to the Xamarin toolchain and can build native iOS and Android
apps without having to shell out additional cash to do so. &lsquo;Bout time, Microsoft. (I suspect this
had everything to do with Satya, to be honest.)</p>
<p>OK, gloat over.</p>
<h2 id="in-2016:816dfc775e64d848cd23e6c10e386ae4">In 2016&hellip;</h2>
<p>&hellip; <a href="http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/2016-tech-predictions/">I said</a>:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Microsoft will continue to roll out features on Azure, and start closing the gap between it and AWS.</strong>
Calling this one a <strong>+1</strong>; it doesn&rsquo;t take much research to see this has definitely been happening in 2016.
However, it&rsquo;s not necessarily a true statement that they&rsquo;ve been closing the gap; Amazon keeps adding
stuff as well, and the feature-parity lists are starting to get ridiculous. Whether these features are
actually <em>of use</em>, however, is an important distinction, and something for the second half of this post.</li>
<li><strong>(X)-as-a-Service providers will continue to proliferate.</strong> Oh my, yes, Ted gets another <strong>+1</strong> for this.
When running a gaming convention has an (X)-as-a-Service for it (seriously, <a href="https://tabletop.events/">here</a>)
then you know the proliferation is in full swing. PaaS providers are exploding everywhere, and while
a few have disappeared (farewell, Parse!), it&rsquo;s clear that this was the gold rush of 2016.</li>
<li><strong>Apple will put out two, maybe three new products, and they&rsquo;ll all be &ldquo;meh&rdquo; at best.</strong> I should&rsquo;ve
broken this into two predictions: one about Apple&rsquo;s &ldquo;meh&rdquo; products, and one about wearables. If I&rsquo;d
done that, I&rsquo;d have scored two <strong>+1</strong>&rsquo;s for it, because not only have wearables not really gone very
far (show me somebody wearing a smart watch, and I&rsquo;ll show you a geek with too much time on their
hands and not enough &ldquo;discrimination&rdquo; in their discriminatory income), but Apple&rsquo;s product releases
have been&hellip; &ldquo;meh&rdquo;! I&rsquo;m looking at you, iPhone 7, and I&rsquo;m <em>really</em> looking at you, MacBook Pro.
(When Consumer Reports doesn&rsquo;t give the MBP its top rating, you know the luster has failed.) More on
Apple in the second half.</li>
<li><strong>iOS 10 will be called iOSX.</strong> Dangit. Such an opportunity wasted. <strong>-1</strong></li>
<li><strong>Android N will be code-named &ldquo;Nougat&rdquo;.</strong> Why, hello there, Android 7.0 Nougat. So pleased to make
your acquaintance. <strong>+1</strong></li>
<li><strong>Java9 will ship.</strong> As I noted last year, @olivergierke <a href="https://twitter.com/olivergierke/status/684642273561329664">pointed out</a>
that Java9 had already slipped to 2017, so this one was already a <strong>-1</strong>. Sigh. And I called it a
&ldquo;no duh&rdquo; event, too&mdash;I&rsquo;m going to let this one cancel out the extra +1 I&rsquo;d have given myself for
the Apple/wearables thing, just to keep the math safe (and my ego relatively sized).
<a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/3011445/java/java-9-delayed-by-slow-progress-on-modularization.html">The article he cited</a>
says that Oracle &ldquo;blamed the delay on complexities in developing modularization&rdquo;, a la Project
Jigsaw.</li>
<li><strong>Facebook will start looking for other things to do.</strong> Welllllllll, it&rsquo;d be really tempting to say
that Facebook&rsquo;s now &ldquo;things to do&rdquo; was &ldquo;Be the deciding factor in who gets elected by passively
encouraging the widespread dissemination of fake news and outright falsehoods!&ldquo;, but seriously,
who would&rsquo;ve believed that even if I had predicted it? Which I didn&rsquo;t. <strong>-1</strong></li>
<li><strong>Google will continue to quietly just sort of lay there.</strong> A year ago, I wrote, &ldquo;Google, for all
that they are on the top of everybody&rsquo;s minds since that&rsquo;s the search engine most of us use, hasn&rsquo;t
really done much by way of software product invention recently. &hellip; I suspect the same will be true of
2016&ndash;they will continue to do lots of innovative things, but it&rsquo;ll all be &ldquo;big&rdquo; and &ldquo;visionary&rdquo;
stuff, like the Google Car, that won&rsquo;t have immediate impact or be something we can use in 2016
(or 2017).&rdquo; And&hellip;. yeah. <strong>+1</strong> More emphasis around the existing products they&rsquo;ve built, but as a company,
they&rsquo;ve clearly spent most of 2016 on the Alphabet/Google restructure (which accomplished&hellip; what,
exactly?), and anything new has been either way quiet or way removed from the business.</li>
<li><strong>Oracle will quietly continue to work on Java.</strong> A year ago, I wrote, &ldquo;[Oracle is not] going to
kill it, but there&rsquo;s really not a whole lot of need to go around preaching its message, either.
So they let the evangelists go, and they&rsquo;ll just keep on keepin&rsquo; on.&rdquo; Score a <strong>+1</strong> for the
long-haired geek in Seattle; they just keep posting new code.</li>
<li><strong>C# 7 will be a confused morass.</strong> If we permit me the freedom to call it &ldquo;.NET Core&rdquo; instead
of just &ldquo;C# 7&rdquo;, then wow do I get a <strong>+1</strong> on this one. Even if I just constrain my prediction
to C# 7/Roslyn, I still score one, but once you throw in the CoreCLR and &ldquo;dotnetcore&rdquo; and the
different profiles and&hellip;. Holy spaghetti web browser history, Batman! The demarcation lines
of the different project teams working on this whole thing are starting to become <em>really</em>
clear as the different OSS projects each look really consistent within themselves, but then,
when you get to the borders, things just&hellip;. fall apart.</li>
<li><strong>Another version of Visual Basic will ship, and nobody will really notice.</strong> Alas, there was
no new version of Visual Basic, since it would be in lockstep with the release of C# 7 (which
didn&rsquo;t ship), but nobody really noticed. Or cared. Still, nothing shipped, so <strong>-1</strong>.</li>
<li><strong>Apple will now learn the &ldquo;joys&rdquo; of growing a language in the public as well.</strong> First there
was Swift 2, which was itself source-incompatible with Swift 1, and then during the summer,
Apple shipped Swift 3, which was&hellip; source-incompatible with Swift 2, owing to some language
changes that the community effectively decided was necessary. <strong>+1</strong>. (And thanks for that, by
the way&mdash;made teaching iOS this Fall a royal PITA.)</li>
<li><strong>Ted will continue to layer in a few features into the blog engine.</strong> You&rsquo;ve got comments!
And I&rsquo;ll take that <strong>+1</strong>, thank you very much.</li>
</ul>
<p>Nine up (ten, if we count my Xamarin prediction from 2015), four down. Not bad. But now, we move
on to the more interesting part of the post: 2017.</p>
<h2 id="2017-predictions:816dfc775e64d848cd23e6c10e386ae4">2017 Predictions</h2>
<p>The calendar year 2017 is going to be a wild one for the tech industry, largely owing to the
rather large orange elephant in the room&mdash;Donald Trump&rsquo;s election to President of the United
States is a huge wildcard whose randomness simply cannot be understated. The man <em>thrives</em> on
being unpredictable, and like most industries, the tech industry (for all that it cherishes
&ldquo;innovation&rdquo; and &ldquo;disruption&rdquo;) thrives on predictability. His collection of &ldquo;tech titans&rdquo; at
Trump Tower last month yielded absolutely zero positive traction that I can see, and I suspect
that the various corporate tech leaders (Nadella, Bezos, Cook, etc) are all looking at him right
now the way humans do a rogue elephant&mdash;he could be good for them, so long as he doesn&rsquo;t go
wild and start tramping everything in his path out of spite, anger, fear, or any other of a half-
dozen emotions. There&rsquo;s no prediction here, though&mdash;just a &ldquo;wow, this is an X-factor&rdquo; that
in turn makes predictions that much harder.</p>
<p>But on that note&hellip;.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>The Congress will call for an investigation into the &lsquo;hacking&rsquo; of the 2016 US election.</strong>
(0.8 probability) To be honest, I&rsquo;m not sure if anybody knows exactly what we mean when we say
&ldquo;the Russians &lsquo;hacked&rsquo; the US election&rdquo; in casual conversation. There&rsquo;s no clear evidence that
the voter machines themselves were cracked or tampered with, but it&rsquo;s fairly easy to see a
correlation with the DNC hacks and Wikileaks disclosures and Trump&rsquo;s corresponding favorability
gains in the polls. That said, though, the five-hundred or so US politicians that make up the Congress
(and excluding Trump himself and his transition team) are not comfortable with the idea that
somebody outside the US engaged in some kind of manipulation of the election, and they are
going to want answers. Just yesterday or the day before, though, Trump made the comment that
hacking is &ldquo;extremely hard to prove&rdquo;, and he&rsquo;s right about that&mdash;without some kind of &ldquo;smoking
gun&rdquo; found in a Russian government employee&rsquo;s possession, it&rsquo;s going to remain a major point of
contention in the coming year, and investigation or not, it&rsquo;s not going to go away regardless of
what the investigation finds.</li>
<li><strong>Security becomes a HUGE deal for the industry.</strong> (0.8) The election is just the tip of the iceberg;
consumers may have gotten used to (and complacent about) corporate security disclosures, but the
idea that the election could be hacked is sending shivers down the collective spines of anyone
who does anything online. The downside is that it&rsquo;s such a complex topic, it&rsquo;s hard for anyone
who&rsquo;s not a computer security expert to really understand what to do; even among experts, there&rsquo;s
a fair amount of disagreement, even on simple issues like scope (how widespread is it) or actual
facts vs hype. Pair that with the paranoia that is inherent in any security professional (if you
think computer security types are paranoid, try talking to physical security professionals for a
while), and you have an industry that&rsquo;s ripe for a lot of snake oil and hyperbole. My prediction,
then, is that <strong>the industry starts to see the first set of &ldquo;security snake oil&rdquo; products</strong>
somewhere within the calendar year 2017. And by that, I mean products that claim to provide
security for your interactions online but in fact do nothing of the sort. (Late-night
infomercials about downloadable web pages that can &ldquo;clean your system&rdquo; of viruses and malware,
move over&mdash;it&rsquo;s time for late-night infomercials about downloadable web page that can &ldquo;secure
you against even the most determined attacker&rdquo;!)</li>
<li><strong>Apple continues to plummet.</strong> (0.7) Their products this year were merely slightly-enhanced copies
of the previous line of products (iPhone 7 vs iPhone 6) or containing gimmicky &ldquo;enhancements&rdquo;
while the core of the product remained essentially unchanged from prior generations (MacBook Pro).
Sorry, folks, the TouchBar does not qualify as &ldquo;disruption&rdquo; or &ldquo;innovation&rdquo;; it&rsquo;s a strip of
touch-sensitive glass from an iPad designed to start prepping you for the idea that Apple can
remove the keyboard entirely, replace it with a touchpad, and then put a hinge in between two
iPad Pros and call it a &ldquo;MacBookPad Pro&rdquo; and charge you $10k for it. (And by the way, if you&rsquo;re
thinking about one of the new MacBook Pro machines, make sure you go into an Apple Store and
try it out&ndash;the keyboard is definitely not the same as its been for years. It feels like they
took about half of the keys&rsquo; &ldquo;press depth&rdquo; away, and it totally changes the &ldquo;touch&rdquo; on the
keyboard. I imagine somebody could get used to it in time, but&hellip; ugh.)</li>
<li><strong>Apple doesn&rsquo;t introduce any new products this year.</strong> (0.6) And by new, I mean something that&rsquo;s not
an incremental improvement on what they&rsquo;ve already got. Heck, I&rsquo;ll even go so far as to say that this
means that there&rsquo;s no new form factors to the existing product line. (Meaning, no new-sized iPad
or iPhone or laptop.)</li>
<li><strong>PC manufacturers double their efforts to build a MacBook Pro.</strong> (0.8) The MBP is vulnerable, for
the first time in a half-decade, and PC manufacturers are going to look for ways to capitalize on
that. Somebody is going to put out a similarly-sized, similarly-weighted non-touch-screen Windows 10
laptop with 32GB of RAM and a 1 or 2 TB SSD, the usual collection of ports, and price it around the
same as MacBook Pro ($2k to $4k), and developers will start buying them. (Bonus points to that
manufacturer if they offer Linux as an out-of-the-box option.) I know I will&hellip;.</li>
<li><strong>Apple rumors about Tim Cook&rsquo;s departure begin.</strong> (0.6) Cook has proven that he&rsquo;s no Steve Jobs;
in fact, the comparisons between his and Steve Ballmer&rsquo;s reign at Microsoft are proving eerily and
entirely similar. Both basically took companies that were defining the marketplace and shepherded
them into a position of trying to manage the cost structures and find better price-points, and in
doing so, killed off much of the mojo that drove both firms. Ballmer took close to a decade to be
run out of Microsoft (and even then, it took BillG&rsquo;s intervention behind the scenes, from what I
can tell), but I don&rsquo;t think the Apple Board is going to wait that long&mdash;I think by the end of
2017 we&rsquo;re going to start hearing serious rumors about Cook being offered a golden parachute to give
up the center chair and let somebody else in to run the show.</li>
<li><strong>Oracle will continue to just write Java.</strong> (0.7) Oracle, despite the best efforts of media and
journalists everywhere, just refuses to get drawn into &ldquo;techno-drama&rdquo;. Java hasn&rsquo;t been the Trojan
Horse into corporate pocketbooks that all the Java-doomsdayers were predicting back when Oracle
acquired Sun, and releases of Java just keep coming through both commercial and OSS channels.
There&rsquo;s really no reason at this point to doubt that Oracle is going to do anything but continue
down that path. Make no mistake, I&rsquo;m sure they&rsquo;re looking for ways to monetize Java in some way
so that they can try to earn back the cash they spent to buy Sun, but I don&rsquo;t think it&rsquo;s going to
be through selling or charging for the JDK or JRE anytime soon.</li>
<li><strong>Oracle Cloud emerges onto the cloud scene in a big splash.</strong> (0.6) IBM now has Bluemix and
Watson, and they were really the last of the &ldquo;big-iron&rdquo; holdouts around the cloud. (What I mean by
that is that all companies have been quietly flirting with cloud, but some push it loud and clear,
a la Microsoft or Google, and some were playing it very quietly for a while.) With IBM acquiring
Loopback (a NodeJS server-side stack) last year, it&rsquo;s clear that IBM is going to push JavaScript
as their main cloud development play, essentially ceding the Java-cloud development ground to
somebody else. Amazon has historically been the place that Java developers have gone to run their
Java code in the cloud, but if Oracle can build a compelling offering (particularly with a free
tier that AWS currently lacks), this could be a relatively big splash. Between Oracle&rsquo;s reputation
in the database world, if they have a solid &ldquo;stack&rdquo; offering that basically makes a Java-based
back-end a snap to start up, Oracle could essentially claim the Java-favored cloud play from
Amazon. (Yes, Heroku is out there and holds a fair amount of Java and Scala love, but now that
they&rsquo;re owned by Salesforce I suspect the Java-leaning flavor of Heroku to wane a bit.)</li>
<li><strong>Salesforce makes a major database acquisition.</strong> (0.5) Salesforce is growing, and they&rsquo;re
clearly interested in expanding their cloud to be more than just the CRM. With Heroku, they have
a Platform that developers can feel comfortable on, but they don&rsquo;t have a big-name database
(relational or otherwise) that complements that play. They currently are sitting on a ton of
cash, and <a href="http://talkincloud.com/saas-software-service/10-salesforce-acquisitions-2016">last year&rsquo;s crop of acquisitions</a>
didn&rsquo;t include a big database storage name. There&rsquo;s not a ton of players left out there, but I
could see them making a strong push to get something like Cassandra or Couchbase. (Yes, they
have Data.com, but that doesn&rsquo;t seem to be making much headway in the developer mindset space.)</li>
<li><strong>Salesforce releases a new programming language.</strong> (0.4) Let&rsquo;s call the spade a spade: Apex is
a Java knock-off, and it shows a lot of warts, particularly since it hasn&rsquo;t really kept up with
what few improvements Java-the-language has made in recent years. The last company to be in this
position&mdash;a red-hot platform but a language feeling a little creaky at the corners and just plain
&ldquo;old&rdquo; everyhwere else&mdash;was Apple right before they released Swift. Salesforce has the engineering
power, they are looking to command more of the developer mindshare, and they have a ton of cash
to blow, so&hellip;. Whether this happens this year, next year, or 2019, I&rsquo;m not sure, but if it
doesn&rsquo;t happen this year, the odds go up each year after that.</li>
<li><strong>LinkedIn Learning starts to make a serious dent in online developer training.</strong> (0.5) Between
the fact that LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com) is growing out its library to a pretty
respectable degree, and the fact that Microsoft now owns LinkedIn, it&rsquo;s pretty reasonable to
assume that Microsoft is going to start making this available to its developer community in
various ways. This may happen in 2018, though, depending on how swiftly Microsoft moves to
incporate LinkedIn assets across the rest of the firm; if they bought LinkedIn solely for the
CRM data to go with Dynamics, for example, then this probably won&rsquo;t happen for a few years.</li>
<li><strong>Swift doesn&rsquo;t go to 4.</strong> (0.7) Swift 3 held breaking changes from Swift 2, and the folks at
Apple are not stupid. Swift 4 will be far, far down the horizon for a few years yet, given that
each major version number bump has heralded incompatibilities. Apple will not want to call anything
&ldquo;Swift 4&rdquo; and dredge up memories of incompatibilities in their customers&rsquo; minds for a while.
Swift might get a 3.1 in the summer, but that&rsquo;s as far as it&rsquo;ll go.</li>
<li><strong>Microsoft ships C# 7.</strong> (0.8) Roslyn needs to ship in 2017 if Microsoft is going to be able to
call this open-source process a success. Otherwise it&rsquo;ll start a lot of people grumbling. (Yes,
a new version of Visual Basic will come with it, and it will make basically no news.)</li>
<li><strong>No new Android version.</strong> (0.4) Android-N is still slowly making its way through the networks,
and while we&rsquo;ll probably start hearing rumors of what Android-8 (Oreo?) will include, with a
targeted ship date of 2018, probably 1Q or 2Q.</li>
<li><strong>Twitter will continue its slide into irrelevancy.</strong> (0.5) Let&rsquo;s face it, Twitter&rsquo;s days are
numbered. If you&rsquo;re holding Twitter stock, now&rsquo;s a good time to sell&mdash;when Twitter was left out
of Trump&rsquo;s &ldquo;tech summit&rdquo; last month, the stated reason was that it was &ldquo;too small&rdquo;. Put that into
your brain-pan and circulate for a while&mdash;the service that invented microblogging and is one of
the core founders of &ldquo;social media&rdquo; was &ldquo;too small&rdquo; for the PEOTUS&rsquo; time. Twitter hasn&rsquo;t really
done anything &ldquo;new&rdquo; or &ldquo;interesting&rdquo;, but simply continued to be the 140-character microblogging
platform it&rsquo;s always been. It&rsquo;s reaching commodity status, in fact. That&rsquo;s not a good sign for
a company that wants to be more than it is. I suspect Jack Dorsey gets tossed on his can, the
company starts looking for a new CEO, and the &ldquo;new vision&rdquo; will start to take shape by the end
of the year (2017), and then in 2018 we find out that the &ldquo;new vision&rdquo; is terrible, takes them
out of their &ldquo;core business&rdquo;, and the slide accelerates. But nobody buys them this year, not yet.</li>
<li><strong>The &ldquo;Internet of Things&rdquo; continues to draw hype, and continues to fail to deliver.</strong> (0.6)
It&rsquo;s been how many years we&rsquo;ve heard about IoT now, and how it will revolutionize our lives,
and all we&rsquo;ve really seen thus far is the wide variety of Internet-enabled devices being subverted
for a widespread DDoS attack. Wearables, &ldquo;smart refrigerators&rdquo; and other IP-enabled devices are
proliferating, but&mdash;to perhaps everybody&rsquo;s surprise but mine&mdash;nobody&rsquo;s quite sure what to DO
with these things once you have them. Your thermostat is online; terrific. Does it have an API
that will let me query meter usage? No, that&rsquo;s a different thing, and a different API, and a
different connection endpoint, and&hellip;. Oh, and be careful, somebody could remote-hack your
thermostat and <a href="http://motherboard.vice.com/read/internet-of-things-ransomware-smart-thermostat">hold your house hostage</a>.
Because that&rsquo;s worth the risk.</li>
<li><strong>Tech &ldquo;unicorns&rdquo; will start to watch the bubble pop.</strong> (0.3) Uber, Lyft, all these companies that are
valued at double-digit billions with zero profits, major losses, and no real assets to sell in
the event of a bankruptcy&hellip;. All of this is going to start to make some investors nervous,
particularly when they look around and realize that the tech sector has been carrying the
country&rsquo;s economy through its &ldquo;recovery&rdquo; (yes, we&rsquo;ve been in a recovery for the last half-decade!).
All it takes is a few small stones to start the avalanche.</li>
<li><strong>Voice-controlled fart apps will emerge.</strong> (0.6) Seriously. As Alexa and Siri and these other
voice-activated systems start to move into stationary devices in your home, and as the SDKs for
these systems start to become more widespread, the first thing developers will do is build some
kind of ridiculously silly app (it would be a kindness to call it a game) that will somehow
sweep everybody&rsquo;s sense of humor into the toilet. (Seriously. Imagine it. &ldquo;Alexa, did you have
beans for dinner?&rdquo; &ldquo;Yes, I did, and&ndash; BRAAAAAAAAAAP!&rdquo; It&rsquo;s exactly the kind of thing that would
get people giggling for hours on end, particularly in a weed-induced state. Did I mention I live
in Seattle?)</li>
<li><strong>Facebook will find that preventing &lsquo;fake-news sites&rsquo; is a lot easier said than done.</strong> (0.8) As a
result, they&rsquo;ll put some kind of &ldquo;AI&rdquo; filter on linked sites, declare a victory, and try to get
out of the political game entirely. It&rsquo;s a lose-lose scenario for them: one man&rsquo;s &ldquo;fake news&rdquo;
site is another man&rsquo;s &ldquo;revolutionary take&rdquo; backed by the First Amendment, and Facebook does not
want to be anywhere near a court trying to justify their actions against Free Speech. (Old-timers
like me will remember Prodigy, <a href="http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/classics-rock/prodigy-the-pre-internet-online-service-that-didnt-live-up-to-its-name/">an online service</a>
that started censoring content, which started its slide into doom.) Zuckerberg doesn&rsquo;t want to be
held responsible for swaying important political events one way or another, but neither does he
want to be the target of numerous political activist lawsuits (from all directions). As Joshua
(the AI in the WOPR, back in the 80s movies that every geek my age openly worshipped) learned,
Zuck will discover that sometimes &ldquo;the only winning move is not to play&rdquo;.</li>
<li><strong>A driverless car will kill somebody.</strong> (0.5) It&rsquo;s only a matter of time. The circumstances
may not be the software&rsquo;s fault&mdash;and in fact it&rsquo;s likely that it won&rsquo;t be, when the final analysis
comes back&mdash;but the headlines will scream, and the widespread fear of a human &ldquo;not being in the loop&rdquo;
will set driverless cars back by years. Expert testimony and repeated demonstrations will do
nothing to shake the public&rsquo;s fear that a computer-driven car could &ldquo;hit a bug and kill me&rdquo;.</li>
<li><strong>The topic of ethics and programming will begin to become fashionable.</strong> (0.3) Somewhere alongside
the driverless car&rsquo;s first fatality, people will start asking how the car&rsquo;s programming makes
decisions that most humans make in a split-second without even thinking about it. Case in point: the
car detects that a motorcycle rider has had a problem and the rider has laid the bike down in the
road right in front of the car. (For discussion purposes, there is no room left to brake; the rider
is too close.) The car can either swerve to the side to avoid the now-helpless rider, potentially
causing a major accident involving multiple people; or the car can simply continue forward, running
over (and very likely killing) the motorcycle rider but avoiding the possibility of multiple fatalities
from a larger accident. Most humans would swerve&mdash;but is that the &ldquo;right&rdquo; decision? More to the
point, what should the software be programmed to do? Once the public gets wind of these kinds of
decisions being made by geeks behind flat-screen LCDs, it&rsquo;s going to cause a major outcry. (And yes,
these kinds of decisions are going to be encoded in the software, somewhere.)</li>
<li><strong>&ldquo;The cloud&rdquo; continues to grow, even as consumers wonder what the hell it is.</strong> (0.7) Let&rsquo;s be
clear&mdash;as of right now, the cloud is basically a developer thing. My parents really don&rsquo;t &ldquo;get&rdquo;
the cloud, largely because there&rsquo;s really nothing they get from it. Sure, one can argue that GMail
is the world&rsquo;s most popular cloud email service&hellip;. but your email is just stored on a server that
Google owns, as opposed to a server that your ISP owns. (If that&rsquo;s your definition of &ldquo;cloud&rdquo;, then
pretty much all client-server computing is &ldquo;cloud&rdquo; in your world.) People are looking at
more online services for things like bill payment, true, but those are basically services being
offered by vendors with whom these people are already doing business&ndash;again, that&rsquo;s not &ldquo;cloud&rdquo;.
Cloud offerings have basically found a home in the developer world, but general-purpose cloud,
the way that cloud was first being sold, is losing its window of opportunity to get hold of
general consumers&rsquo; minds. (I lose this prediction if my parents are suddenly smitten with a product
that stores or computes for them and isn&rsquo;t a vendor they already have a relationship with.)</li>
<li><strong>&ldquo;Blockchain&rdquo; remains the most opaque &lsquo;thing&rsquo; of the year.</strong> (0.8) Everybody will go on and on about its
huge technical advantages and obvious benefits, while never actually describing what it is or how it
could work to change the world it&rsquo;s so clearly destined to change. It&rsquo;s the ultimate hype machine,
and it will show no signs of slowing down until maybe the end of the year. By that time, something
will emerge out of it (the way blockchain emerged out of bitcoins and cryptocurrency) that will
carry forward the legacy of &ldquo;changing the world&rdquo; without actually changing anything.</li>
<li><strong>Artificial intelligence will continue to remain a &lsquo;future&rsquo; thing.</strong> (0.8) Part of the reason I say
this is because AI is like magic&mdash;if you can understand it, it&rsquo;s not interesting anymore and it&rsquo;s just
an implementation detail. We&rsquo;ve had rules engines and natural language processing for years. When
Amazon started doing &ldquo;predictive analysis&rdquo; of what you would like to buy, we pulled &ldquo;data science&rdquo;
and &ldquo;behavioral analytics&rdquo; out of the &ldquo;AI&rdquo; world and into its own category. When AI figured out how
to make the spoken word make sense, we called it &ldquo;speech-to-text&rdquo; and it was a feature on Android
alreday back in the v2 days. (Marry speech-to-text up with a natural language parser, and you have
Siri&mdash;which, remember, was its own company before Apple acquired them.) No, Alexa is not going to
revolutionize the world any more than Siri did&mdash;the act of talking to a machine is not particularly
new, and it&rsquo;s only as good as the services that sit behind the parser and can &ldquo;hook in&rdquo; to the
parsed text. &ldquo;Cortana, fire up StarCraft 2&rdquo; is easy to parse and start an application; &ldquo;Cortana,
fire up StarCraft 2, and find me a random Hard co-op match as Artanis&rdquo; requires not just firing
up an application, but also &ldquo;hooking&rdquo; inside the application to know how to carry out the rest of
the request. That requires an API platform that all applications can hook into, provide, and describe
(in natural-text terms) to the voice-control system. That is not going to be easy to define, adopt,
or test.</li>
</ul>
<p>On a personal note, several predictions come to mind:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Ted will celebrate his one-year anniversary at Smartsheet in September.</strong> I&rsquo;m optimistic about these
guys, and the things we can do together. I&rsquo;m looking forward to taking them into the developer limelight
in a variety of different ways.</li>
<li><strong>Ted will do less speaking this year.</strong> My new role actually encourages me to help develop new talent
for my employer to go out and do the actual speaking, so while I&rsquo;m definitely down for doing a few
conferences this year, it&rsquo;s not going to be more than 12, total, for the calendar year. I enjoy speaking,
but I&rsquo;m looking to be a lot more careful about where I speak now.</li>
<li><strong>Ted will not be renewed as a Microsoft MVP.</strong> Actually, this appears to be fact, not a prediction.
MVP renewals for the January cycle went out already, and I didn&rsquo;t receive one. Fortunately, most of
the stuff I care about in the Microsoft world is all open-source (or moving that way) anyway, and
while it&rsquo;s been nice being on the MVP mailing lists, there&rsquo;s really been nothing there that&rsquo;s been
all that insightful or amazing. (And, fortunately, living in Redmond makes it trivially easy to get
together with anybody on a product team if I really want or need to, and I am privileged to call many
of the people on those teams &ldquo;friend&rdquo;.) It would&rsquo;ve been 14 years, but as we Stoics say, &ldquo;All good things,
in time, must come to an end.&rdquo;</li>
<li><strong>Ted will look to engage with other tech companies beyond Microsoft.</strong> Google just started a new
MVP-like program, and I&rsquo;ve been teaching Android and Angular and some Google Cloud Platform stuff for
a while, so perhaps they&rsquo;ll welcome me into their fold.</li>
<li><strong>Ted will continue to teach at UW.</strong> I&rsquo;ve been guest-lecturing at UW for the past three years now,
and I&rsquo;m loving it. The students are bright, eager, and a helluvalot smarter than I was at that age.
They&rsquo;re an incredible joy to teach.</li>
<li><strong>Ted will look to publish a few mobile apps.</strong> I&rsquo;ve had a few ideas floating around for a while, but
just never really made the time to do it. Even if they never turn a dime in profit, I&rsquo;m long overdue
for having a few apps in the respective mobile stores.</li>
<li><strong>Ted will continue to write for various tech &lsquo;zines.</strong> I love having the back-page editorial at
CODE Magazine, the column in MSDN, and the various series on developerWorks, among others. I fully
intend to keep all that going at full speed. (And I&rsquo;m always looking for new outlets, if anybody has
any leads on paid technical content gigs!)</li>
<li><strong>And finally, Ted will try to blog more.</strong> The perennial projection. I&rsquo;ve got much to blog about,
including the patterns series, as well as some interesting themes and ideas floating around the ol&rsquo;
brain pan.</li>
</ul>
<p>Happy Holidays, and thanks for reading!</p>
Speaking Tips: Evaluating Your Talkhttp://blogs.tedneward.com/post/speaking-tips-evaluating-your-talk/
Tue, 25 Oct 2016 21:50:30 -0700http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/speaking-tips-evaluating-your-talk/
<p><em>tl;dr</em> The talk is given, and inevitably, some well-meaning soul asks you afterwards, &ldquo;How did
it go?&rdquo; I won&rsquo;t tell you how to answer, but for me, the answer is always, &ldquo;I have no idea;
that&rsquo;s for them to judge, not me.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Quite honestly, part of the reason I say this lies in the simple realization that no matter
how you answer, you&rsquo;re either wrong, arrogant, or falsely humble. If the audience thinks the
talk went well, but you think it was terrible, you seem either out of touch or affecting a
false sense of humility. If you think it went well but the audience thinks it was terrible,
you look like an idiot or a douchebag. If you and the audience both think it went well, you
run the risk (smaller, perhaps) of seeming arrogant or &ldquo;overly proud&rdquo;, and if you think it
went horribly and the audience agrees with you, you seem out of touch and/or &ldquo;if you knew
it was bad, why didn&rsquo;t you fix it?&ldquo;.</p>
<p>But part of the problem is that sometimes the audience gets more out of the talk than you
realize, so even if you didn&rsquo;t get what you wanted out of the talk (your message got lost
in the noise of your demos, perhaps, or your demos didn&rsquo;t go as well as you would&rsquo;ve liked
or any of dozens or other things), the audience may have an entirely different opinion.
(Matter of fact, I&rsquo;ve had that exact scenario happen to me: gave a talk, every single demo
I gave bombed, and still it came back as one of the highest-rated talks I&rsquo;ve ever given,
because&mdash;as one audience member told me later&mdash;they loved that I just kept rolling with
it, didn&rsquo;t derail the talk trying to force the demos to work, and that &ldquo;it was nice to
see that even industry thought leaders can have a bad day at work!&rdquo;</p>
<h3 id="evaluating-the-evaluations:63a5a756e2c056e454f21c1e2b872e4e">Evaluating the evaluations</h3>
<p>Which means, then, that your best source of talk-effectiveness lies in the evaluations
that a conference will ask the attendees to fill out. Not that this is the best source,
but not an always-accurate source; lots of things can interfere with an honest appraisal
of your talk:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Attendees will blame you for conference issues.</strong> Too hot, too cold, seating issues,
bad food, slides weren&rsquo;t available on a CD (or, for reals, one attendee gave me a
lowest-rating-possible because the slides weren&rsquo;t available on a floppy disk), there&rsquo;s
always something that an attendee can find wrong with the conference, and use your
talk eval as a way to communicate their displeasure to the conference as a whole.</li>
<li><strong>Attendees often don&rsquo;t read your abstract, and grade you on the talk they wanted you
to give, not the talk you gave.</strong> &ldquo;Would have liked to see more on WebSockets,&rdquo; reads
the evaluation, despite the fact that this talk was on AngularJS. Or, &ldquo;Speaker didn&rsquo;t
get into aspect-oriented programming&rdquo; in your talk on .NET Generics. Or, my personal
favorite, &ldquo;Too much time spent on Swift&rdquo; in a talk&hellip; on Swift!</li>
<li><strong>Attendees will contradict each other.</strong> &ldquo;Speaker needed to spend more time on
generic functions.&rdquo; &ldquo;Speaker spent too much time on generic functions.&rdquo; Yup, thanks
for that. Comments can cancel each other out, particularly if they&rsquo;re one-offs on
each side.</li>
<li><strong>Attendees are not professional speakers.</strong> They can tell you what they liked, or
what they didn&rsquo;t like, but they often can&rsquo;t tell you why, any more than you can
tell a professional chef why the dish they made just didn&rsquo;t quite do it for you.
(It&rsquo;s actually much harder than you might think.)</li>
<li><strong>Only about 10% of the attendees will turn in an evaluation.</strong> Hey, come on! There
were only a limited number of donuts at the break table, and if they&rsquo;d taken the time
to fill out the evaluation, they&rsquo;d have missed a shot at one of the rainbow sprinkles!</li>
<li><strong>Only the attendees with strong feelings will turn in an evaluation.</strong> If they hated
you, they&rsquo;ll turn in an eval. If they loved you, they&rsquo;ll turn in an eval. If they
were anywhere between &ldquo;Blah&rdquo;, up through &ldquo;Meh&rdquo;, and up until &ldquo;Hmmm, interesting&rdquo;,
they&rsquo;re more likely to not bother with an eval. Conference evaluations are not a
scientific poll&mdash;far from it. They&rsquo;re a poll of &ldquo;whomever bothered&rdquo;, which any
politcal pollster will tell you is basically one step up from &ldquo;purely randomly
generated answers&rdquo;. (Think of it like this: how representative of the country&rsquo;s
beliefs nationwide on on gun control will a poll be if we only ask people walking
out to their cars at the local gun range?)</li>
<li><strong>The longer they wait to turn in an evaluation, the lower your score goes.</strong> The
more time they have to think about it, the more things they can think about that they
didn&rsquo;t like about the talk. Or they&rsquo;re talking about it with somebody else, who asks
a question that didn&rsquo;t get answered in the talk, and they think, &ldquo;Oh, yeah, sure,
that question should&rsquo;ve been answered in there somehow&rdquo; and grade you down a bit.</li>
</ul>
<p>For all these reasons and more, you need to keep a couple of things in mind when you
look at evaluations:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Gymnastics scoring.</strong> In Olympic Gymnastics, you always take the highest score
and the lowest score and throw them out. (And you always ignore the scores from the
East German judge&mdash;those people never like <em>anything</em>. But, then again, neither
would you, if all you ate every day was boiled cabbage.) As a matter of fact, you
probably should ignore the top 5% and bottom 5% entirely and then just take an
average of the rest. But having said that&hellip;.</li>
<li><strong>Avoid making a metric out of them.</strong> Remember, this is not a scientific poll,
largely because no conference goes to the effort necessary to make it one. Thus,
the quality of the feedback in an all-scored evaluation is already suspect from
the beginning&mdash;trying to build some kind of accountability metric out of
evaluations is a recipe for disaster. (Microsoft used to do this&mdash;in spades!&mdash;for
their TechEd conferences, and it was anywhere between depressing to outright
demeaning to see speakers, clustering around the monitor in the speaker lounge
with the dashboard statistics on each talk, trying to see who &ldquo;won&rdquo; the conference.
Inevitably, tempers flared, sides were chosen, and it got all &ldquo;West Side Story&rdquo;
in there really quickly.) Don&rsquo;t ignore the evals entirely, though, because&hellip;.</li>
<li><strong>Comments trump scores.</strong> Rating me a 5 out of 5 doesn&rsquo;t tell me anything. A
comment of &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t imagine how to improve this session&rdquo; tells me a lot more. A
rating of 1 out of 5 with no explanation is worse than no information&mdash;I can either
assume you thought a &ldquo;1&rdquo; was actually the top score instead of the bottom, or I can
assume that you actually meant to give me the worst score possible because you
didn&rsquo;t like the T-shirt I ws wearing or&hellip; actually, I can imagine anything I
want, and it will all be about as useful as imagining nothing at all. Scores are
generally pretty worthless as anything other than a rough average; comments,
on the other hand, can offer some details about what should be different. And, funnily
enough, finding out what can/should be improved is a lot more helpful when
trying to improve the talk. But, having said that&hellip;.</li>
<li><strong>Keep a mental heat map of the comments when you read them.</strong> Realistically,
when pressed, anybody can come up with something they&rsquo;d like to see different
or improved in the talk. It&rsquo;s only when everybody says the same thing, however,
that I start to pay attention. If one or two people in a room of a thousand thought
the session wasn&rsquo;t technically deep enough, <em>pffft</em>. That&rsquo;s like 0.1% of the
total, and that many people also probably didn&rsquo;t like my choice of T-shirt
that day, either. But if half the room (or, more accurately, half the people
who bothered to hand in an eval) thought I wasn&rsquo;t deep enough, that makes me
sit up and take notice. It doesn&rsquo;t mean that I was wrong&mdash;particularly if
I kept to the abstract and delivered the talk that I said I was going to
deliver&mdash;but it does mean that there was a gross miscommunication somewhere
and needs correcting.</li>
</ul>
<p>Evaluations are helpful, but they&rsquo;re definitely not the last word.</p>
<h3 id="self-evaluation:63a5a756e2c056e454f21c1e2b872e4e">Self-evaluation</h3>
<p>All that aside, though, it&rsquo;s nearly impossible for a speaker to <em>not</em> judge themselves.
It&rsquo;s just too strong a desire, too deeply wired into the human psyche to not want to
look in the mirror and say, &ldquo;How&rsquo;d I do?&rdquo; I&rsquo;ve been doing talks for twenty years,
and I still do it, too, even though I don&rsquo;t always trust my own instincts. (I like
to operate from Socrates&rsquo; position of &ldquo;All I know is that I know nothing&rdquo;, because
then it forces me to look for evidence to confirm or deny my intuitions, rather than
letting my intuitions quietly select the evidence that supports them.)</p>
<p>So, in the spirit of trying to get a bit more objective about self-evaluation,
here&rsquo;s a list of things to evaluate:</p>
<ul>
<li>Timing. Did you go long? Short? Were you at the halfway point of your talk when
the halfway point of the slot came and went?</li>
<li>Questions. Did you accurately predict what the audience questions would be?</li>
<li>Demos. How smooth were the demos? Did you have to cover for yourself somehow while
giving a demo (as in, were you talking to try and fill in dead air while you were
typing something or waiting for the demo to compile or run)?</li>
<li>Audience recognition. How many of the audience members do you recognize? (If you
made good eye contact during the show, you&rsquo;ll recognize certain faces when they
come up to you and/or when you run into them in other parts of the event.)</li>
<li>Casualties. How many people bailed out on your talk? Not everybody leaving the
room is a casualty, but if they&rsquo;re fleeing the back in droves, chances are the
people up front probably wanted to leave but couldn&rsquo;t because it would&rsquo;ve been
too obvious. (People in the back somehow assume that they&rsquo;re harder to spot.)</li>
<li>More questions. How many audience questions did you get? No questions is a bad
sign: either you were too basic and nobody had to ask any questions, or you were
too complicated or complex and nobody could follow what you were doing. (This is
different for keynotes, by the way: the larger the room, the less likely you are
to get questions during your talk. Regional quirks also need to be taken into
account here&mdash;Europeans are much less chatty than Americans. Except for the
people in Madison, WA; those folks are just dead inside.)</li>
</ul>
<p>But even here, unless you&rsquo;re recording your talk, your interpretation may be somewhat
suspect.</p>
<p>So what&rsquo;s the well-meaning speaker to do?</p>
<h3 id="brutally-honest-evaluation:63a5a756e2c056e454f21c1e2b872e4e">Brutally honest evaluation</h3>
<p>Easy: ask people who know you well&mdash;even better if they, too, are speakers&mdash;to
evaluate your talk. Ask them to be brutally honest: tell you the things they liked,
and the things they didn&rsquo;t, in roughly equal amounts. (OK, let&rsquo;s be clear here,
it&rsquo;s probably going to be more of a 3-to-1 ratio, heavily favored towards things
they didn&rsquo;t like, because it&rsquo;s a lot easier for us as humans to identify the things
we don&rsquo;t like more than the things we like. Personally, I&rsquo;m OK with that, but new
speakers may need more in the way of encouragement and support.)</p>
<p>Here&rsquo;s a working checklist for evaluating another speaker, by the way, if you don&rsquo;t
have one of your own; you don&rsquo;t have to track all of these, but the savvy speaker
will pick a dozen or so specifically on which the evaluator should focus:</p>
<ul>
<li>What was the central message of the talk? (Don&rsquo;t fill this in until the end.)</li>
<li>Timing: When did it start? When did it end? Roughly what time felt like the
halfway point?</li>
<li>Outline: What did the outline of the talk look like to you? (As a crutch, how was
the talk structured? Choose one of: Chronological | Spatial | Causal | Comparative |
| Problem-solution/Pain-promise)</li>
<li>Organization: How well did the talk flow from one element to the next? Could you
spot the transitions?</li>
<li>Memorable: What&rsquo;s the one thing you remember from this talk?</li>
<li>Humor wins/fails: Count the number of jokes that worked, and the jokes that bombed.
(Make sure to compare this with the speaker&rsquo;s own idea of what was a joke and
what wasn&rsquo;t&mdash;sometimes the best jokes were totally unintended, but by all means,
note them and use them again!)</li>
<li>Vocal Delivery: Write down all the volume levels the speaker used during this talk
(Loud, Soft, Moderate, Shout, Whisper, any other adjectives that come to mind,
as your mind defines them; the goal is to see the variance)</li>
<li>Crutch counter: Count all the &ldquo;ums&rdquo;, &ldquo;uhs&rdquo;, &ldquo;right&rdquo; or other crutch words the
speaker used during the talk.</li>
<li>Physical Delivery: Write down all the gestures the speaker used during this talk
(Pointing to slide, pointing to audience, holding up hands to represent something
abstract during an explanation, whatever; again, the goal is to see the variance)</li>
<li>Nervous Delivery: Write down all the gestures communicating &ldquo;nervousness&rdquo; or
&ldquo;anxiety&rdquo; that the speaker used (jingling change or keys in pocket, for example)</li>
<li>Introduction:
<ul>
<li>How long did it last?</li>
<li>Did it set the tone for the rest of the talk?</li>
<li>Was it clear?</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Body:
<ul>
<li>How long did it last?</li>
<li>What was the main vehicle for delivering the message? Statistics? Demos?
Persuasion? Quotes from relevant figures? Pictures?</li>
<li>Can you (the evaluator) recite the main body points from memory?</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Content:
<ul>
<li>How many analogies did the speaker use to explain the content?</li>
<li>How many direct descriptions did the speaker use?</li>
<li>Was there any uncommon jargon used that wasn&rsquo;t explained/defined?
(&ldquo;Uncommon&rdquo; here means it could&rsquo;ve appeared in an IT manager&rsquo;s magazine/e-zine
like ZDNet or GeekWire, without explanation attached.)</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Conclusion:
<ul>
<li>Did it tie the body together back to the introduction?</li>
<li>Did the conclusion raise any new information?</li>
<li>Was the talk ended clearly? (Trailing off and mumbling is a horrible way to
end a presentation; nobody knows if it&rsquo;s over or not.)</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Body Language:
<ul>
<li>Did the speaker&rsquo;s eyes move around the room?</li>
<li>Did the speaker move across the stage periodically, particularly towards the
edges, in order to make better connection with the &ldquo;wings&rdquo; of the audience?</li>
<li>How many times did the speaker speak to the slide? (As in, physically facing the
slides while words were being said; if the speaker was quoting off the slide&mdash;and
only part of the slide, mind you&mdash;for emphasis, that time doesn&rsquo;t count.)</li>
<li>How long did the speaker speak directly into the laptop? (As in, staring
at the laptop screen while seated behind it? Code demos count half-time; you
need to be able to see what you&rsquo;re typing, but you also should be making
efforts to check in with the crowd visually every few seconds or so even while
typing code in.)</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<p>There&rsquo;s a ton more that could be added; anybody with a Toastmaster&rsquo;s evaluation
sheet could improve this by a large margin, for example. And, if you as a speaker
have a particular habit,</p>
<p>In particular, though, groom some people close to you to be this brutally-honest
audience. Emphasize to them that the goal of their feedback isn&rsquo;t to make you feel
good about your talk, but to improve&mdash;a good coach needs to be honest about what
works and what doesn&rsquo;t. Ideally, this should be a person that will watch more than
just one or two of your talks&mdash;you want them to get to know you, your style, and
learn to recognize your particular weaknesses or crutch issues.</p>
<p>My most recent talk (as of this writing) was the closing keynote at a conference
in Warsaw, just last week. My wife came along with me for the show, and she agreed
(as she usually does, bless that poor woman&rsquo;s heart) to sit in on the keynote. It
went off pretty well&mdash;most of the scores (I&rsquo;m told) were very high, and it was
one of the top-three-rated talks of the show. That said, when we got into the taxi
to head back to the hotel to drop off stuff and meet up with other speakers for
dinner, she gave me a pretty thorough rundown, including &ldquo;You seemed a little rusty
on this one in parts&rdquo;, &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t exactly see how some of the ideas came together
at the end&rdquo; and &ldquo;It felt like in places you were trying to force-fit a joke into
place and it didn&rsquo;t come off quite right&rdquo;. This was valuable stuff, and I absolutely
love the woman for that.</p>
<p>Groom your critic to give you brutally honest feedback, and you will advance in
your speaking skills by leaps and bounds</p>
Revisiting Rotorhttp://blogs.tedneward.com/post/revisiting-rotor/
Thu, 13 Oct 2016 01:34:07 -0700http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/revisiting-rotor/<p><em>tl;dr</em> As part of preparing for a workshop next week in Poland, I&rsquo;ve been diving back
into the CLR source code&mdash;which takes me back to my old friend, Rotor.</p>
<p>For those of you who came to the CLR late, back in 2002 Microsoft offered up an open-source
version of the CLR called the Shared Source CLI. (&ldquo;CLI&rdquo;, for those who don&rsquo;t know, is the
official ECMA Specification describing the virtual machine that .NET uses as its runtime.
The &ldquo;CLR&rdquo; is the commercial name for Microsoft&rsquo;s implementation of the Common Language
Infrastructure specification.) I can still remember the feeling of shock and awe when I
heard that Microsoft was actually going to release the source&mdash;albeit with some of the
core parts simplified for easier research purposes&mdash;to what it considered its flagship
technology for the coming decade. Wow.</p>
<p>And then I got to write a book on it. Double wow.</p>
<p>And then Microsoft decided to pay me to follow up on the first edition with a second
edition, which they would give away for free. Which, by the way, you can get off of
my professional site <a href="http://www.newardassociates.com/files/SSCLI2.pdf">here</a>.</p>
<p>Triple wow.</p>
<p>But I want to call out something I wrote <a href="http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/sscli-20-internals/">eight years ago</a>,
in the Prologue to the second edition:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>&ldquo;[T]he book also marks a turning point, as well: with the release of the FCL source to the wider world of the development community and the lack of significant changes to the execution engine since v2, the Rotor distribution has effectively been &ldquo;cut loose&rdquo; by its original creators, to stand on its own within the community, as every open source project must do at some point. This is not a cause for alarm or concern—-the Mono project continues full force, and Microsoft‘s growing comfort with the open-source community leads to the distinct possibility that the commercial CLR source will, one day, stand where Rotor once stood.&rdquo;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It&rsquo;s probably bad form to smirk as hard as I am right now. But I&rsquo;m still doing it.</p>
<p>Thank you, David Stutz, for blazing the trail that Rotor could go down, and in doing so start the avalanche
that would eventually become Microsoft&rsquo;s engagement in the larger world of open source. We in the
Microsoft community owe you a pretty big debt.</p>
Speaking Tips: Tell A Storyhttp://blogs.tedneward.com/post/speaking-tips-tell-a-story/
Mon, 19 Sep 2016 00:49:15 -0700http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/speaking-tips-tell-a-story/
<p><em>tl;dr</em> When doing a presentation, there should always be some kind of &ldquo;story&rdquo; to the presentation.
It doesn&rsquo;t have to be a full-blown Shakespearean &ldquo;Things get worse, things get a little better, then
things get way worse, and either they eventually get better (a comedy) or they just end worse (a tragedy)&rdquo;
plot arc, but your audience needs to have a narrative arc to the talk that they can sort of hang on to
while you&rsquo;re doing your thing. And, as it turns out, you need it as much as they do.</p>
<p>Too often, when an apprentice speaker shows me their outline, it&rsquo;s a wonderfully crafted entity of logic,
detailing a lovely introduction to the thing, three core aspects of teh thing, and a conclusion that
describes the thing and wraps up the talk. It&rsquo;s a carefully-crafted Aristotelian arc, following the
ancient Churchillian formula of &ldquo;Tell &lsquo;em what you&rsquo;re going to tell &lsquo;em, tell it to &lsquo;em, then tell &lsquo;em
what you just told &lsquo;em.&rdquo;</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s also boring as shit.</p>
<p>The key element that many novice presenters forget is that sitting in chairs for an hour-plus is an
actual battle of willpower. The body wants to remain in motion&mdash;it hates being constrained to one place
for any length of time. It&rsquo;s why humans fidget in their chairs, take out their laptops, check their phones,
and all the other little (distracting) things that people do during talks.</p>
<p>Here&rsquo;s the ugly little secret that nobody wants to tell you: they&rsquo;re bored. And when people are bored,
their bodies start to create physical stimulation so as to alleviate some of the boredom. Sometimes they&rsquo;ll
be polite about it and keep it to a minimum, but not always. Now, I&rsquo;ll grant you, not all motion is
an indicator of boredom&mdash;some people like taking notes, be it longhand on paper or in computerized
(or, more recently, tabletized) fashion. But in those cases, those people will be otherwise very still&mdash;they
are concentrating on what you&rsquo;re saying, and they won&rsquo;t be engaging in some of the other physical
movement that alleviates the boredome.</p>
<p>And, of course, this is a gross stereotype; everybody is a little bit different. However, keep this
in mind as you gaze out across the room as a whole. If lots of people are fidgeting, it&rsquo;s pretty likely
that you&rsquo;re boring them.</p>
<p>How, then, do we not be boring?</p>
<h2 id="stories-vs-facts:eeb4875703e91346f90f95a64fa2247d">Stories vs facts</h2>
<p>Consider this:</p>
<p>&ldquo;Mary left her house at 7:30 am. She walked to the store. She purchased a ham, some asparagus, and
some cooking spices. She returned to her house at 9am. She began to clean, and at noon she went out
with some friends for lunch. When she returned at 1:30, she began preparing dinner for her husband.
He did not arrive until 10pm, and the two of them began to argue.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Meh. Boring. But now, consider it this way:</p>
<p>&ldquo;Mary woke up in the morning, determined to not let the events of the previous day ruin her plans
for today, the anniversary of when she and her husband, Tom, first met. She went to the store,
picking out the things for the special dinner she was going to make for the two of them that night,
and when she got back, she began to clean the house so that she could surprise him with a candlelit
dinner in the living room. She went out with some friends, who were all just as excited about the
evening&rsquo;s plans as she was, and when she got back from lunch, she began to cook.&rdquo; You know, I don&rsquo;t
know that I even have to tell you how this one ends. You already know.</p>
<p>What&rsquo;s the difference between the first rendition and the second? Easy: emotions. Feelings. The
reader can put themselves <em>into</em> a story, whereas plain facts just rest on the paper. Either you&rsquo;re
Mary, excited about surprising somebody you care about with a special celebration, or you&rsquo;re Tom,
who really doesn&rsquo;t understand why the hell anybody celebrates the anniversary of the day that he
ran into her at a mall, I mean, come on, Mary, it was like two years before they started dating,
why would anybody remember something so trival, and&mdash;</p>
<p>Er, right. Sorry. Got a little wrapped up in that tale myself. Because stories do that to you.
And they can do that to your audience, too, if you approach your talk like a story instead of a
police blotter.</p>
<h2 id="storytelling:eeb4875703e91346f90f95a64fa2247d">Storytelling</h2>
<p>Take a moment with me and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZBKX-6Gz6A">click here</a>. I swear it&rsquo;s
not a Rickroll; we don&rsquo;t have time for that. It&rsquo;s a link to what has to be the best parody of every
TED talk ever given. Go watch it. It&rsquo;s short, only about five minutes. Come on back when you&rsquo;re
done.</p>
<p>Back? Cool. Kinda funny, right? But did you notice something about his presentation? Two things
stand out:</p>
<ol>
<li>It&rsquo;s a presentation about <em>absolutely nothing at all</em>.</li>
<li>It still told a story.</li>
</ol>
<p>In this particular case, the story is &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a Thought Leader, and this is how I became a Thought
Leader, and, by implication, you can too, and make the world a better place.&rdquo;</p>
<p>From a talk that is about <strong><em>nothing at all</em></strong>.</p>
<p>People want to hear a talk that has a story to it; we are naturally story-loving creatures. This is
why politicians keep &ldquo;singling people out&rdquo; during their stump speeches, as best exemplified by
&ldquo;Joe the Plumber&rdquo; back during the Obama/McCain campaign. His story was supposed to be reflective
of everybody, the &ldquo;everyman&rdquo; of American politics. It resonates with us, because we can see ourselves
in the story&rsquo;s protagonists. (Or, at least, in a well-written story, it would.)</p>
<p>The fact is, you can&rsquo;t craft a winning presentation out of dry facts. It&rsquo;s just going to leave the
audience bored to tears, no matter how accurate your logic or how amazing the conclusion. When people
are done with a session that is simply a recitation of facts, they tend to lose the whole thing in
their minds and can&rsquo;t remember much beyond a small set of basics.</p>
<p>But if you tell a story, you can decide what they will remember, and that will help them realize
that your talk was persuasive and helpful, even if it was persuasive in a direction they hadn&rsquo;t
expected or anticipated. (I have given talks where my goal is to persuade people not to use the thing
I&rsquo;m talking on except in very narrow scenarios. I&rsquo;m looking at you, EJB.)</p>
<h2 id="what-now:eeb4875703e91346f90f95a64fa2247d">What now</h2>
<p>Go back to your outline. Throw out all the facts, and start from a story. Or an opinion. Or something
else that doesn&rsquo;t ring of cold fact. Giving a talk on TypeScript? Cool: tell me why I, the audience,
care. I don&rsquo;t really care what your story arc is (obviously this has to be something you believe in, but
I the audience member don&rsquo;t really care too much one way or another); here&rsquo;s a few ideas:</p>
<ul>
<li>&ldquo;TypeScript is the best expression of a JavaScript transpiler that has yet to reach the Web. It combines
the power and efficiency of a statically-type-checked language with the underlying dynamic platform of
the browser to provide an elegant mix of both.&rdquo;</li>
<li>&ldquo;Learning TypeScript is an exercise in slowly abandoning bad habits of the dynamically-typed JavaScript
underneath it, and growing stronger and healthier habits around type-checked programming.&rdquo;</li>
<li>&ldquo;TypeScript is a language that clearly will only appeal to developers who grew up in the world of strait-
jacketed languages like C++, C# or Java. Here&rsquo;s how to use TypeScript without losing the dynamic
goodness that made JavaScript great.&rdquo;</li>
</ul>
<p>I don&rsquo;t much care what your narrative arc is&mdash;that&rsquo;s for you, the speaker, to decide. But you need to
have one. It&rsquo;s easier, in many ways, to stake out a strong opinion and then work to defend it, as I do in
the first and the last examples above, but in some respects the story makes more sense if you can craft it
as how the audience should structure their journey through the thing, as I do in the middle. (And notice
that the middle idea still stakes out the opinion that dynamically-typed/untyped programming is somehow
intrinsically &ldquo;bad&rdquo;.)</p>
<p>(Note that I don&rsquo;t personally believe any of the above; they&rsquo;re examples, nothing more.)</p>
<p>You need to craft a narrative arc for your talk. Some of the speakers I&rsquo;ve hung out with at conferences
believe that a presentation should follow a classic &ldquo;Shakespearean Arc&rdquo; of:</p>
<ul>
<li>There is a status quo; something comes along to disturb that</li>
<li>Things get worse</li>
<li>Things get a little bit better</li>
<li>Things get much, much worse</li>
<li>Things either resolve out better (a Shakespearean comedy) or collapse entirely (a tragedy)</li>
</ul>
<p>In other words, the thought is that your talk should take a &ldquo;three act&rdquo; approach.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;m not as big a fan of that theory, personally, but if that works for you, by all means, go for it. It
can work particularly well with keynotes, which tend to want to be more persuasive in style, but for a
technical talk, it&rsquo;s a little hard to pull off. Besides, it can get a little cheesey if you&rsquo;re not
careful: &ldquo;In the beginning, JavaScript developers wrote code, and it was OK. But then applications got
bigger, and woe! They couldn&rsquo;t keep things straight anymore. Microsoft gave us TypeScript, and it made
things a little better, but OH NOEZ! Along came frameworks like AngularJS, which embraced dynamism and
made static typing all that much harder.&rdquo; (Then, either TypeScript got better in return and they all
lived happily ever after, or it didn&rsquo;t, and all the JavaScript programmers killed each other, making it
a true Shakespearean tragegy. Your call.)</p>
<h2 id="tips-to-a-narrative-arc:eeb4875703e91346f90f95a64fa2247d">Tips to a narrative arc</h2>
<p>Sometimes it can be hard to find that story in your talk. I sympathize; I find it hard to do that with
a fair number of the talks I give, particularly breakout sessions on core subjects. How on earth do
you find a story in &ldquo;Introduction to Swift&rdquo;, for crying out loud?</p>
<p>Here&rsquo;s a couple of thoughts:</p>
<ul>
<li>Remember <a href="http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/speaking-tips-proposals/">that abstract you wrote</a>? The key
elements there were &ldquo;Pain&rdquo; and &ldquo;Promise&rdquo;. Go back to that. Start from a perspective of somebody just
starting with this technology, then walk them right up to the Pain. &ldquo;When you do this, oh, crap, things
just got worse.&rdquo; This should be no more than <sup>1</sup>&frasl;<sub>3</sub> of your talk. Now, spend the next <sup>2</sup>&frasl;<sub>3</sub> walking them
through to the Promise. End on a success note.</li>
<li>Tell a personal story that underlies the talk. A simple place to start is your own experience&mdash;when
you first got started with the thing, what happened? What were the obstacles that got in your way?
What was the &ldquo;a-ha&rdquo; moment for you around this thing that made you finally understand it? I will
frequently tell this kind of story around my experience coming to understand Java: At first, as a
pretty hard-core C++ guy, I couldn&rsquo;t understand why anybody would want to give up all the language
power of C++ for a stripped-down and oversimplified version in the Java language. Once I got to see
how the Java language was actually just a thin shell over the power of the Java Virtual Machine,
however, and I could see what the JVM afforded me at runtime, now all of a sudden I &ldquo;got&rdquo; Java and
it made a lot more sense.</li>
<li>Tell several stories as punctuation marks. At various points in your presentation (not more than one
every fifteen minutes or so, in my rough estimation), use stories from your life or your career to
underscore a point you want to make. Usually it&rsquo;s best if these are funny stories, to help break
the tension and keep people engaged, but more than anything, the story should underscore the point
the presentation is trying to make. Don&rsquo;t fake it, and don&rsquo;t try to force a story to fit. These
stories should also &ldquo;fit&rdquo; into a larger arc, but sometimes if that larger arc doesn&rsquo;t seem to be
coming to mind, you can use these punctuation stories as a way to help people solidify your points
in their own minds.</li>
</ul>
<p>There&rsquo;s a lot of room here with respect to storytelling, so don&rsquo;t get too distracted by the trees.
The goal here is to create a single narrative arc that supports your two-sentence summation of your
talk, and use stories to help flesh that out. If the story concept doesn&rsquo;t seem to be fitting, then
drop it and keep your focus on the narrative arc itself: Why do I care? Why should I listen to your
talk? What&rsquo;s in it for me? What pain can you spare me, or what promise can you give me, that will be
worth my time in exchange? If you can put that into a form that has some level of emotion in it, you
will have connected much more strongly with your audience.</p>
<h2 id="homework:eeb4875703e91346f90f95a64fa2247d">Homework</h2>
<p>Read the following books:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others-ebook/dp/B000N2HCKQ/ref=sr_1_1#nav-subnav">Made to Stick</a>, (Heath, Heath)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Switch-Change-Things-When-Hard/dp/0385528752/ref=sr_1_2">Switch</a>, (Heath, Heath)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A5DCALY/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&amp;btkr=1#nav-subnav">Nudge</a>, (Thaler, Sunstein)</li>
</ul>
<p>There&rsquo;s a ton more, but these will help get you started.</p>
I have ADDhttp://blogs.tedneward.com/post/i-have-add/
Thu, 15 Sep 2016 01:28:29 -0700http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/i-have-add/<p><em>tl;dr</em> In the wake of the recent Simone Biles &ldquo;scandal&rdquo;, it&rsquo;s important for people who are in like
situations to stand up and be counted. So, although this is something I&rsquo;ve never really kept a secret,
it&rsquo;s well past time to &lsquo;fess up and admit: I, too, have been diagnosed with ADD.</p>
<p>Simone Biles, for those who haven&rsquo;t heard, was recently
<a href="http://www.people.com/article/simone-biles-olympics-drug-leak-adhd">victimized by Russian hackers</a> who
sought to expose her as a gymnast who takes forbidden medication and thus expose her as much of a fraud
as the Russian gymnasts who were banned from the Olympics were. Turns out, she takes Ritalin, as
prescribed by the doctor, and has for most of her (admittedly, to this point, fairly short) life.
She&rsquo;s not hiding from it, though, and has
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/simonebiles/posts/854938111274425">come out publicly</a> to say that she&rsquo;s not ashamed of being
somebody who wrestles with ADHD.</p>
<p>Attention Deficit Disorder, cousin to its more easily-spotted condition, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
Disorder (ADHD), is not an uncommon thing among adults. Daniel Amen, of the Amen Clinic (one of the leading
organizations involved in ADD/ADHD and autism research), has estimated that 1 in 10 members of the general
population has ADD/ADHD. He&rsquo;s even suggest that there are biological reasons for why human beings would
evolve such a scenario among the brain&rsquo;s chemisty: the characteristics of the ADD/ADHD individual are
actually the exact same characteristics one would want in a hunter: broad spectrum of attention, quick
shift of focus, intense burst of focus on a particular topic/subject/entity/scenario for short periods
of time, and so on. Granted, ADD/ADHD doesn&rsquo;t do well when you&rsquo;re trying to be a &ldquo;farmer&rdquo;, which requires
careful and close attention to detail over long periods of time and an ability to concentrate despite
what might be going on in the background. But that&rsquo;s why 1 in 10 are ADD/ADHD, and the rest&hellip; aren&rsquo;t.
Or at least, according to Amen. And <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/data.html">the CDC</a>, who probably
know a few things about medicine.</p>
<p>ADD and ADHD aren&rsquo;t what you think they are, but <a href="http://www.add-adhd.org/ADHD_attention-deficit.html">numerous</a>
<a href="http://www.healthline.com/health/adhd/difference-between-add-and-adhd">other</a>
<a href="http://www.helpguide.org/articles/add-adhd/adult-adhd-attention-deficit-disorder.htm">places</a> that
describe it in much more glowing detail. Suffice it to say, it&rsquo;s generally not what most people think
it is, and in fact I&rsquo;ve known a number of adults that I&rsquo;m pretty sure are undiagnosed ADD/ADHD.
ADD/ADHD is, however, considered a medical condition, and not something that can be corrected with
&ldquo;better parenting&rdquo; or &ldquo;stricter rules&rdquo;; in fact, that&rsquo;s probably the easiest way to turn your kids
into extremely anxious and unhappy teenagers. It&rsquo;s sort of like saying &ldquo;Your lack of one arm is just
due to bad parenting and lax discipline; if your parents would just take a more strict position, you
could do everything two-armed people could do, too.&rdquo; And if you think it&rsquo;s limited to just kids, I&rsquo;ve got
an interesting question for you. Two of them, in fact: one, do you think ADD/ADHD just popped into the
world a few years ago, and two, what do you think happened to all the kids with ADD/ADHD before now who
grew up with it? Some of us figured out coping mechanisms on our own, some of us never really got a
handle on it (ever known an adult who just couldn&rsquo;t help but be the center of attention, even at great
personal cost?), and some found chemical ways to provide the stimulation, usually at great personal
cost.</p>
<p>Myself, I was diagnosed as an adult. The story is one that I&rsquo;ll not tell here, but suffice it to say it
was one of those &ldquo;OH!&rdquo; moments. Specifically, the psychologist was saying that somebody else I knew very
well probably had ADD/ADHD, because they did X, Y, and Z, and my reaction was classic: &ldquo;They can&rsquo;t possibly
have it because I do all those things, too.&rdquo; The psychologist looked at my wife, my wife looked at the
psychologist, and then they both looked at me, and I went, &ldquo;OH!&rdquo; (ADD/ADHD does not always mean &ldquo;not
clueless&rdquo;.)</p>
<p>The bigger fact is, I have a personal issue.</p>
<p>In fact, my issue is that ADD/ADHD is considered to be a &ldquo;disorder&rdquo;. I don&rsquo;t consider it as such. Yes,
it means that my brain is wired a little differently than most other people&rsquo;s. What you consider to be
stimulating, I don&rsquo;t. Or, to be more precise, it&rsquo;s not <em>enough</em>. That, you see, seems to be the heart of
the ADD/ADHD individual&rsquo;s condition: we don&rsquo;t get the same &ldquo;jolt&rdquo; of stimulation of a given situation or
scenario than other people do. That means we go a little extra distance to create that little additional
stimulation that all brains crave. Sometimes that means jumping up and down and generating laughs from
the audience (the ADHD scenario); sometimes that means allowing our brains to drift off into other
worlds and imagining stories in our head (the ADD scenario, sometimes called &ldquo;dreamer&rdquo; syndrome). Either
way, it&rsquo;s a quest for stimulation.</p>
<p>I don&rsquo;t consider that a disorder, personally. I <em>like</em> being able to switch topics quickly. As a matter
of fact, I find it incredibly helpful in social situations&mdash;I can listen to a couple different
conversations around me (if they&rsquo;re not too far away), and that gives me the ability to &ldquo;pop in&rdquo; to a
given conversation&mdash;and sometimes bring my current &ldquo;circle&rdquo; of conversation partners in with me&mdash;to
another conversation while maintaining the topic&rsquo;s consistency, and use that as an opportunity to make
a few introductions. Then, I can shift away, and suddenly I&rsquo;ve introduced a group of people to one another
that might never have met, and good things typically happen out of that.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s also what allows me to maintain some level of focus on a variety of different topics. Programming
languages, platforms, data stores, you name it, but well beyond that, I read across philosophy,
psychology, history, political science, sports (the ESPN app on my iPhone is awesome), current events,
fiction, and a few other things besides. I tend not to finish a book linearly. <em>shrug</em> There will be
a number of times when I don&rsquo;t finish the book at all&mdash;once I&rsquo;ve gleaned what I want out of it, I
will unashamedly put it down and move on to the next. Or bounce back and forth and see if the two have
any mutually-supporting ideas.</p>
<p>Don&rsquo;t get me wrong, I have to manage it the same way anybody has to manage personal shortcomings. I
have a terrible time with being on time for things&mdash;I keep underestimating the amount of time it will
take me to get ready for a thing, and how much time it will take me to get there. I have a hard time
keeping my schedule in my brain, and I can easily get distracted into doing something far more
stimulating&mdash;like writing this blog post&mdash;than the thing I&rsquo;m supposed to be doing.</p>
<p>Unlike Ms Biles, I choose not to take meds; I tried them, and frankly, I didn&rsquo;t care for the way that
they made me feel. Not any sort of physiological reaction (though frankly they can really do a number
on somebody&rsquo;s personality and make them feel &ldquo;wooden&rdquo; or &ldquo;zombie&rdquo;-like, which is never a good thing),
but because I simply didn&rsquo;t care for the idea that somehow I needed medication to be &ldquo;normal&rdquo;.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;m not broken. I&rsquo;ve never been broken. I&rsquo;m different, sure, and that means that when I try to
interact with the &ldquo;normal&rdquo; world (if there is such a thing), I have to make allowances. Just because
I have ADD doesn&rsquo;t mean I&rsquo;m not allowed to be late to the meeting&mdash;it&rsquo;s not an excuse. My deadlines
for articles and books and whatever-else still remain the same, and I have to make sure that I can
meet those expectations that others have of me. Such is life.</p>
<p>But that &ldquo;different wiring&rdquo; in my brain makes speaking at conferences a thrill, not a fear. You want
to talk about <em>stimulating</em>? My, oh, my, nothing gets the old adrenaline going like standing in front
of a room of a thousand-plus people and getting them to laugh at your jokes, making up one-liners on
the fly and having them land solidly, having people come up to you after the presentation and saying
how inspired they are by your talk, and more. I get little jolts of electricity in my brain just
thinking about it. It&rsquo;s a large part of the reason why I continue to speak&mdash;not because I owe the
community any kind of payback, but because it just feels good to do so.</p>
<p>As I get older, I&rsquo;m either slowing down, my brain chemistry is zeroing out, or I&rsquo;m finding other
ways to get that stimulation, though, because now, it&rsquo;s not quite what it once was. Maybe the
&ldquo;speaking&rdquo; drug is starting to lose its potency and the stimulation I derive from it isn&rsquo;t as
strong. Or perhaps I&rsquo;m simply craving a different set of challenges I want to sink my teeth into.
(More on that on Monday.) Whatever the reason, speaking represents a huge stimulation, but now
I&rsquo;m finding other ways to get the same.</p>
<p>All of this is basically to say, Simone Biles, you&rsquo;re not alone. And if you&rsquo;re somebody in this
industry with ADD/ADHD (and believe me, there are a lot of us&mdash;disproportionate to the rest of
the general population, for certain), but you&rsquo;re not sure how to embrace it as opposed to being
embarrassed or ashamed of it, it&rsquo;s OK. You don&rsquo;t have to be public about it. I&rsquo;m not doing this
because I expect everybody else to follow suit.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;m doing this because I don&rsquo;t mind, and because it&rsquo;s been said that somebody has to blaze that
trail. Ms Biles is, perhaps unintentionally, doing that for teenage girls; perhaps I am here to do
that for forty-something adult technologists. I dunno. Nor will I make much of a deal about it after
this blog post.</p>
<p>But if any of you ever want to talk about my experience with ADD, my Inbox is always open.</p>
<p>Now, what was I doing before I got distracted, again&hellip;?</p>
Seattle Code Camp 2016http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/seattle-code-camp-2016/
Thu, 15 Sep 2016 00:41:22 -0700http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/seattle-code-camp-2016/<p><em>tl;dr</em> I spoke at Seattle Code Camp last weekend, and I wanted to make links to the slides available
for anyone who was interested in consuming them.</p>
<p>The two talks I gave, <a href="http://www.newardassociates.com/slides/Keynotes/WhyIntlRelationsTrumpsCS.pdf">&ldquo;Why My International Relations Degree Trumps your CS Degree&rdquo;</a> and
<a href="http://www.newardassociates.com/slides/Keynotes/PsyPhilProg.pdf">&ldquo;PsyPhilProg&rdquo;</a>, were pretty
well-received overall, but as always, I find I have things that I want to tune. Still, that being
said, if you enjoyed the talk(s), that&rsquo;s awesome, and if you&rsquo;ve been inspired to go dig up some
non-CS reading material to improve your development career, even better. If I can carve out some
time, I&rsquo;ll amend this post to include a suggested reading list.</p>
The Fallacies of Enterprise Computinghttp://blogs.tedneward.com/post/enterprise-computing-fallacies/
Wed, 24 Aug 2016 23:55:16 -0700http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/enterprise-computing-fallacies/
<p>More than a decade ago, I published
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Enterprise-Java-Ted-Neward/dp/0321130006">Effective Enterprise Java</a>,
and in the opening chapter I talked about the Ten Fallacies of Enterprise Computing, essentially an
extension/add-on to Peter Deutsch&rsquo;s Fallacies of Distributed Computing. But in the ten-plus years
since, I&rsquo;ve had time to think about it, and now I&rsquo;m convinced that Enterprise Fallacies are a different
list. Now, with the rise of cloud computing stepping in to complement, supplment or replace entirely
the on-premise enterprise data center, it seemed reasonable to get back to it.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;ll expand on the items in the list over future blog posts, I imagine, but without further ado,
here&rsquo;s the Fallacies of Enterprise Computing.</p>
<ol>
<li><strong><em>New technology is always better than old technology</em></strong></li>
<li><strong><em>Enterprise systems are not &ldquo;distributed systems&rdquo;</em></strong></li>
<li><strong><em>Business logic can and should be centralized</em></strong></li>
<li><strong><em>Data, object or any other kind of model can be centralized</em></strong></li>
<li><strong><em>The system is monolithic</em></strong></li>
<li><strong><em>The system is finished</em></strong></li>
<li><strong><em>Vendors can make problems go away</em></strong></li>
<li><strong><em>Enterprise architecture is the same everywhere</em></strong></li>
<li><strong><em>Developers need only worry about development problems</em></strong></li>
</ol>
<p>As Deutsch said, &ldquo;Essentally everyone, when they first build a [enterprise] system, makes the
following [nine] assumptions. All prove to be false in the long run and all cause big trouble and
painful learning experiences.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Naturally, I welcome discussion around these, and I may edit and/or append to this list as time goes
by, but this is where the past decade has led me.</p>
<h3 id="new-technology-is-always-better-than-old-technology:63f5940fe4930058d151265425e8ed3f">New technology is always better than old technology</h3>
<p>After building IT systems for more than sixty years, one would think we as an industry would have
learned that &ldquo;newer is not always better&rdquo;. Unfortunately, this is a highly youth-centric industry,
and the young have this tendency to assume that anything new to them is also new to everybody else.
And if it&rsquo;s new, it&rsquo;s exciting, and if it&rsquo;s exciting, it must be good, right? And therefore, we
must throw away all the old, and replace it with the new.</p>
<p>This cannot be emphasized enough: This is fallacious, idiotic, stupid, and brain-dead.</p>
<p>This fallacy is an extension of the old economic &ldquo;limited market&rdquo; fallacy: The more gains one entity
makes in a market, the more that other entities lose. (Essentially, it suggests that the market is
intrinsically a zero-sum game, despite obvious evidence that markets have grown substantially even
in just the last hundred years since we started tracking economics as a science.) Thus, for example,
if the cloud is new, and it has some advantages over its &ldquo;competitors&rdquo;, then every &ldquo;win&rdquo; for the
cloud must mean an equal &ldquo;loss&rdquo; for the alternatives (such as on-prem computing). Never mind that
the cloud solves different problems than on-prem computing, or that not everything can be solved
using the cloud (such as computing when connections to the Internet are spotty, nonexistent, or
worse, extremely slow).</p>
<p>Now, for those of you who have been engaged in the industry for more than just the past half-decade,
here&rsquo;s the $65,535 question for you: How is &ldquo;the cloud&rdquo; any different from &ldquo;the mainframe&rdquo;, albeit
much, much faster and with much, much greater storage?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. &ndash;George Santanyana, Historian</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I&rsquo;ve seen this play out over and over again, starting with my own entry into the IT universe with
C++ (which was the &ldquo;new&rdquo; over C), and participated in a few system rewrites to C++ from other
things (Visual Basic being one, C being another, sometimes some specific vertical stuff as well).
Then I saw it again when Java came around, and companies immediately started rewriting some of
their C++ systems into Java. This time around, I started to ask, &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;, and more often than not,
answers of &ldquo;We don&rsquo;t want to fall too far behind&rdquo; or &ldquo;We need to modernize our software&rdquo; were the
fairly vague answers. (When pressed as to why &ldquo;falling behind&rdquo; was bad, or why software needed to
be modernized, I was usually shushed and told not to worry about it.)</p>
<p>In the years since, I keep thinking that companies have started to get this message more thoroughly,
but then something comes along and completely disrupts any and all lessons we might have learned.
After Java, it was Ruby. Or, for those companies that didn&rsquo;t bite on the Java apple, it was .NET.
Now NodeJS. Or NoSQL. Or &ldquo;cloud&rdquo;. Or functional programming. Or take your pick of any of another
half-dozen things.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, as much as I wish I could believe that &ldquo;it&rsquo;s different this time&rdquo; and we as an
industry have learned our way through this, I keep seeing signs that no, unfortunately, that&rsquo;s
too much to hope for. The easy way to mitigate this fallacy is to force those advocating new
technology to enumerate the benefits in concrete terms&mdash;monetary and/or temporal benefits,
ideally, backed by examples and objective analysis of pros and cons.</p>
<p>By the way, for those who aren&rsquo;t sure if they can spot the fallacy, the easy way to tell if
somebody is falling into this fallacious trap is to see if their analysis contains both
positive and negative consequences. No technology is never without its negatives, and a
practical and objective analysis will point it out. If it&rsquo;s you doing the analysis, then
force yourself to ask the question, &ldquo;When would I <em>not</em> use this? What circumstances would
lead me away from it? When is using this going to lead to more pain than it&rsquo;s worth?&rdquo;</p>
<h3 id="enterprise-systems-are-not-distributed-systems:63f5940fe4930058d151265425e8ed3f">Enterprise systems are not &ldquo;distributed systems&rdquo;</h3>
<p>This means, simply, that any enterprise system is subject to the same fallacies as any other
distributed system. Reliability, latency, bandwidth, security, the whole nine yards (or the whole
eight fallacies, if you prefer) are all in play with any enterprise system.</p>
<p>If you&rsquo;re not familiar with the Eight Fallacies of Distributed Systems, take some time to make
yourself familiar with them and some of the mitigation strategies.</p>
<h3 id="business-logic-and-should-be-centralized:63f5940fe4930058d151265425e8ed3f">Business logic and should be centralized</h3>
<p><em>(Note: I wrote this up a long time ago in a blog post as the &ldquo;Eleventh Fallacy of Distributed Systems&rdquo;,
but it feels vastly more relevant as an Enterprise Fallacy.)</em></p>
<p>The reason this is a fallacy is because the term &ldquo;business logic&rdquo; is way too nebulous to nail down correctly, and because business logic tends to stretch out across client-, middle- and server- tiers, as well as across the presentation and data access/storage layers.</p>
<p>This is a hard one to swallow, I’ll grant. Consider, for a moment, a simple business rule: a given person’s name can be no longer than 40 characters. It’s a fairly simple rule, and as such should have a fairly simple answer to the question: Where do we enforce this particular rule? Obviously we have a database schema behind the scenes where the data will be stored, and while we could use tables with every column set to be variable-length strings of up to 2000 characters or so (to allow for maximum flexibility in our storage), most developers choose not to. They’ll cite a whole number of different reasons, but the most obvious one is also the most important–by using relational database constraints, the database can act as an automatic enforcer of business rules, such as the one that requires that names be no longer than 40 characters. Any violation of that rule will result in an error from the database.</p>
<p>Right here, right now, we have a violation of the &ldquo;centralized business logic&rdquo; rule. Even if the length of a person’s name isn’t what you consider a business rule, what about the rule stating that a person can have zero to one spouses as part of a family unit? That’s obviously a more complicated rule, and usually results in a foreign key constraint on the database in turn. Another business rule enforced within the database.</p>
<p>Perhaps the rules simply need to stay out of the presentation layer, then. But even here we run into problems–&ndash;how many of you have used a website application where all validation of form data entry happens on the server (instead of in the browser using script), usually one field at a time? This is the main drawback of enforcing presentation-related business rules at the middle- or server-tiers, in that it requires round trips back and forth to carry out. This hurts both performance and scalability of the system over time, yielding a poorer system as a result.</p>
<p>So where, exactly, did we get this fallacy in the first place? We get it from the old-style client/server applications and systems, where all the rules were sort of jumbled together, typically in the code that ran on the client tier. Then, when business logic code needed to change, it required a complete redeploy of the client-side application that ended up costing a fortune in both time and energy, assuming the change could even be done at all–the worst part was when certain elements of code were replicated multiple times all over the system. Changing one meant having to hunt down every place else a particular rule was–or worse, wasn’t–being implemented.</p>
<p>This isn’t to say that trying to make business logic maintainable over time isn’t a good idea–&ndash;far from it. But much of the driving force behind &ldquo;centralize your business logic&rdquo; was really a shrouded cry for &ldquo;The Once and Only Once Rule&rdquo; or the &ldquo;Don’t Repeat Yourself&rdquo; principle. In of themselves, they&rsquo;re good rules of thumb. The problem is that we just lost sight of the forest for the trees, and ended up trying to obey the letter of the law, rather than its spirit and intentions. Where possible, centralize, but don&rsquo;t take additional costs beyond the benefits of doing so.</p>
<p>By the way, one place where the &ldquo;centralize only if it&rsquo;s convenient&rdquo; rule has to be set aside is around validating inputs from foreign locations&mdash;in other words, any data which is passed across the wire or comes in from outside the local codebase. In order to avoid security vulnerabilities, data should <em>always</em> be verified as soon as it reaches your own shores, even if that means duplicating it in every foreign-accessible interface.</p>
<h3 id="models-can-be-centralized:63f5940fe4930058d151265425e8ed3f">Models can be centralized</h3>
<p>As tempting as it is to create &ldquo;one domain model to rule them all&rdquo;, particularly given all the love for Domain-Driven Design in the past ten years or so. A similar corollary to the &ldquo;one domain model&rdquo; is the &ldquo;one database model&rdquo;&mdash;at some point in the enterprise IT manager&rsquo;s tenure, somebody (usually a data architect or consultant) will suggest that massive savings (of one form or another) can be had for the taking if the company takes the time to create a unified database. In other words, bring all the different scattered databases together under one roof, centralized in one model, and all the data-integration problems (data feeds into databases, ETL processes, and so on) will be a thing of the past as every single codebase now accesses the Grand Unified Data Model.</p>
<p>I have never seen one of these projects ever actually ship. Other architects have told me that they&rsquo;ve had them ship, but when I follow up with people who&rsquo;ve been at said companies, the universal story I hear is that once built, the resulting model was so complex and unwieldy that within a short period of time (usually measured in months) it was abandoned and/or fractured into smaller pieces so as to be usable.</p>
<p>The problem here is that different parts of the enterprise care about different aspects of a given &ldquo;entity&rdquo;. Consider the ubiquitous &ldquo;Person&rdquo; type, which is almost always one of the first built in the unified model. Sales cares about the Person&rsquo;s sales history, Marketing cares about their demographic data (age, sex, location, etc), HR cares about their company-related information (position, department, salary, benefits status, etc), and Fulfillment (the department that ships your order once purchased) cares about address, credit card information, and the actual order placed.</p>
<p>Now, obviously, trying to keep all of this in one Person entity (the so-called &ldquo;fat&rdquo; entity, since it has everything that any possible department could want from it) is going to be problematic over time&mdash;if nothing else, fetching a list of all of the Persons from the system for a dropdown will result in downloading orders of magnitude more data than actually required. (This also
runs afoul of the &ldquo;Bandwidth is inifite&rdquo; and &ldquo;Latency is zero&rdquo; and &ldquo;Transport cost is zero&rdquo; fallacies of Distributed Systems.) Clients will quickly start caching off only the parts they care about, and the centralized data model is essentially decentralized again.</p>
<p>The next reasonable step is to split Person up into &ldquo;derived&rdquo; models, usually (in the relational sense) by creating subsidiary tables for each of the specific parts. This is reasonable, assuming that the cost of doing joins (in the relational sense) across the tables is acceptable. Unfortunately, these sorts of centralized data models are usually supposed to hold the entirety of the enterprise&rsquo;s data in one database, so the costs of doing joins across millions of rows in multiple tables is often prohibitive. But let&rsquo;s leave that alone for a moment.</p>
<p>Where things really start to go awry is that enterprise systems are never monolithic (see the next fallacy), and the code that accesses the centralized data model often needs to be modified in response to &ldquo;local&rdquo; concerns; for example, HR may suddenly require that &ldquo;names&rdquo; (which are common to the Person core table) be able to support internationalization, but Marketing is right in the middle of an important campaign, and any system downtime or changes to their codebase are totally unacceptable. Suddenly we have a political tug-of-war between two departments over who &ldquo;owns&rdquo; the schedule for updates, and at this point, the problem is no longer a technical problem whatsoever. (This is the same problem that sank most centralized distributed systems, too&mdash;any changes to the shared IDL or WSDL or Schema have to ratified and &ldquo;bought off&rdquo; by all parties involved.)</p>
<p>Where this falls apart for domain models is right at the edge of the language barrier&mdash;a domain model in the traditional DDD sense simply cannot be shared across language boundaries, no matter how anemic. Classes written in C# are not accessible to Java except through tools that will do some form of language translation for local compilation, and these will almost always lose any behavior along the way&mdash;only the data types of the fields will be brought along. Which sort of defeats half the point of a Rich Domain Model.</p>
<h3 id="the-system-is-monolithic:63f5940fe4930058d151265425e8ed3f">The system is monolithic</h3>
<p>While this may have been true in older systems (like, around the mainframe era), often the whole point of an enterprise system is to integrate with other systems in some way, even if just accessing the same database. Particularly today, with different parts of the system being revised at different times (presentation changes but business logic remains the same, or vice versa), it&rsquo;s more important than ever to recognize the different parts of the system will need to deploy, version, and in many cases be developed independently of one another.</p>
<p>This fallacy is often what drives the logic behind building microservice-based systems, so that each microservice can be managed (deployed, versioning, developed, etc) independently. However, despite the fact that many enterprise IT departments are building microservices, they then undo all that good work by then implicitly creating dependencies between the microservices with no mitigating strategy to deal with one or more of those microservices being down or out. This means that instead of explicit dependencies (which might force the department or developers to deal with the problem explicitly), developers will lose track of this possibility until it actually happens in Production&mdash;which usually doesn&rsquo;t end well for anybody.</p>
<h3 id="the-system-is-finished:63f5940fe4930058d151265425e8ed3f">The system is finished</h3>
<p>The enterprise is a constantly shifting, constantly changing environment. Just when you think you&rsquo;ve finished something, the business experts come back with some new requirements or some changes to what you&rsquo;ve done already. It&rsquo;s the driving reason behind a lot of the fallacies of both distributed systems and enterprise systems, but more importantly, it&rsquo;s the underlying impetus behind most, if not all, enterprise software development. Enterprise developers can either embrace this, and recognize that systems need to be able to evolve effectively over time&mdash;or look for work in other industries.</p>
<p>This means, then, that anything that gets built here should (dare I say &ldquo;must&rdquo;) be built with an eye towards constant-modification and incessant updates. This is partly why agile methodologies have taken the enterprise space with such gusto&mdash;as a construction approach, by the fact that agile embraces the idea that everything is constantly in flux, it deals far more easily with the idea that the system is never finished.</p>
<h3 id="vendors-can-make-problems-go-away:63f5940fe4930058d151265425e8ed3f">Vendors can make problems go away</h3>
<p>Alternatively, we can phrase this as &ldquo;Vendors can make problem &lsquo;X&rsquo; a vendor problem&rdquo;, where &lsquo;X&rsquo; is one of scalability, security, maintainability, flexibility, and just about any other &ldquo;ility&rdquo; you care to name. As much as vendors have been trying to make this their problem, for the better part of two or three decades, they&rsquo;ve never been able to do so except in some very narrow vertical circumstances. Even in today&rsquo;s cloud-crazed environment, companies that try to take their existing enterprise systems and move them to the cloud as-is (the classic &ldquo;lift and shift&rdquo; strategy) are finding that the cloud has nothing magical in it that makes things scale automagically, secure them, or even make them vastly more manageable than they were before. You can derive great benefits from the cloud, but in most cases you have to meet the cloud halfway&mdash;which then means that the vendor didn&rsquo;t make the problem go away, they just re-cast the problem in terms that make it easier for them to sell you things. (And even then, they can only make a few of those probems go away, often at the expense of making other problems more difficult. As an example of how deployments and dependency management got burned, for example, see &ldquo;npm-Gate&rdquo;.)</p>
<h3 id="enterprise-architecture-is-the-same-everywhere:63f5940fe4930058d151265425e8ed3f">Enterprise architecture is the same everywhere</h3>
<p>Somehow, there seems to be this pervasive belief that if you&rsquo;ve done enterprise architecture at company X, you can take those exact same lessons and apply them to your experience at company Y. This might be true if every company had exactly the same requirements, but ask any consultant who&rsquo;s been engaged with clients for more than a few years, and you&rsquo;ll find out that the Venn diagram of requirements between any two companies overlaps about 80% or so. But here&rsquo;s the ugly truth of that secret: if we look at the Venn diagram of all the companies, they aren&rsquo;t overlapping on the same 80%&mdash;it&rsquo;s always a different 80% between themselves and any other company. Which means, collectively, that the sum total of all companies overlaps across maybe 5%. (All accounting systems agree on what credits and debits are, but from there, the business rules tend to diverge.)</p>
<p>Given that enterprise architecture is highly context-sensitive to the enterprises for which it is being developed, it would stand to reason that enterprise architecture will differ from one company to the next. No matter what the vendor/influencer tries to tell you, no matter how desirable it is to believe, there is no such thing as a &ldquo;universal enterprise architecture&rdquo;; not MVC, not n-tier, not client-server, not microservices, not REST, not containers, and not whatever-comes-next.</p>
<h3 id="developers-need-only-worry-about-development-problems:63f5940fe4930058d151265425e8ed3f">Developers need only worry about development problems</h3>
<p>Enterprise systems come with much higher criticality concerns than the average consumer software product. Consider, for a moment, the average iOS or Android application&mdash;if it crashes mid-use, the user is obviously annoyed, and if it happens too often, they might uninstall the application entirely, but no signficant monetary loss is incurred to the company. If, on the other hand, the company&rsquo;s e-commerce system crashes, literally thousands of dollars are potentially being lost per minute (or second, if the scale is that of an Amazon or other large-scale e-tailer) until that system gets back on its feet and can start processing transactions again. And that&rsquo;s not counting the cost of potential customer service costs or even lawsuits if an order is lost because the system went down mid-transaction and put the data into a corrupted or unrecoverable state. Nor does that consider the intangible costs that come into play when Ars Technica or Forbes or&mdash;worst of all&mdash;the Wall Street Journal covers the outage in their latest report.</p>
<p>Enterprise systems, by definition, have much higher reliability and recoverability concerns. That means, practically speaking, that any enterprise system must pay much greater attention to how the system is administered, deployed, monitored, managed, and so on. Thanks to the emphasis on the whole &ldquo;DevOps&rdquo; thing, this is becoming less of an argument with most developers, but even within companies that don&rsquo;t subscribe to all of the &ldquo;DevOps&rdquo; philosophy, developers will need to spend time thinking (and coding) about how operations staff will do all of the things they need to do to the system after its deployment.</p>
<p>For example, one such concern is that of error management and handling. But first, please repeat after me: &ldquo;It is never acceptable to find out about an enterprise system outage from your users.&rdquo; Why this is not an accepted truth is well beyond me, but countless enterprise systems seem to feel it perfectly acceptable to show their users stack traces when things go wrong, or that it&rsquo;s perfectly acceptable to only worry about restarting the system when a user complaint informs Operations it&rsquo;s down.</p>
<p>Yes, vendors can often provide certain kinds of management software to look at the system from the outside&mdash;keeping track of processes to make sure they&rsquo;re still running and such&mdash;but on the whole, it&rsquo;s going to be up to developers building the enterprise system to make sure that Operations staff can peer inside the system to make sure everything is running, running smoothly, and can make the changes necessary (such as adding users, changing users&rsquo; authorized capabilities, adding new types of things into the system, and so on) without requiring a restart or editing cryptic text files. Management, monitoring, deployment, restarting the system after a failure&mdash;these, and more, are all developer responsibilities until the developers provide those capabilities to Operations staff to actually use.</p>
Developer Supply Chain Managementhttp://blogs.tedneward.com/post/developer-scm/
Thu, 18 Aug 2016 23:38:17 -0700http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/developer-scm/
<p>At first, it was called &ldquo;DLL Hell&rdquo;. Then &ldquo;JAR Hell&rdquo;. &ldquo;Assembly Hell&rdquo;. Now, it&rsquo;s fallen
under the label of &ldquo;NPM-Gate&rdquo;, but it always comes back to the same basic thing:
software developers need to think about their software build and runtime dependencies
as a form of Supply Chain Management. Failure to do so&mdash;on both the part of the
supplier and the consumer&mdash;leads to the breakdown of civilization and everything
we hold dear.</p>
<p>Well, OK, fine, not exactly the breakdown of <em>all</em> civilization. But certainly a
breakdown in the part of civilization that is currently occupied by those who would
lead a happy and productive lifestyle in the platform under discussion (whether that
be native code, Java, .NET, JavaScript, or what-have-you).</p>
<p>For those who haven&rsquo;t seen the disaster that was NPM-Gate, allow me to refer
you to a few links:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-npm">The Timeline</a>.
Probably the closest thing to an &ldquo;official&rdquo; history of what happened.</li>
<li><a href="http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/rage-quit-coder-unpublished-17-lines-of-javascript-and-broke-the-internet/">ARS Technica</a>&rsquo;s views on the subject</li>
<li><a href="http://uk.businessinsider.com/npm-left-pad-controversy-explained-2016-3">Business Insider UK</a>
also reported on the mess</li>
</ul>
<p>The upshot, however, was that the removal (rightly or wrongly) of a package that
a core package (ExpressJS, among others) depended on led to an obscene number of
sites suffering an outage.</p>
<h3 id="interpreting-the-deploy:60dcd7231c05aebc967cadddc695fdf4">Interpreting the deploy</h3>
<p>To some, particularly those coming from the native, Java or .NET persuasion, this
missing dependency may seem odd&mdash;after all, it would really only make itself felt
when the project was compiled, not at runtime. If the project had already been
&ldquo;built&rdquo; (which, in the NodeJS world, would mean having already downloaded all of
the dependencies and deployed), then why would the package&rsquo;s subsequent removal
really make all that much of a difference?</p>
<p>Here, we come to the part where conventions and cultural habits come into play;
when a NodeJS-based system is deployed, it&rsquo;s typically deployed without its
dependencies, rather than with them. Recall that NodeJS, like all Javascript-based
environments, is an interpreter, not a compiler or virtual machine. Thus, the habit
among the NodeJS community is to deploy the source code along with a manifest file
(package.json) that in turn describes all of the dependencies. Then, as part of the
deploy, one issues the command to pull the dependencies down (<code>npm install</code>), and
the application is ready to go.</p>
<p>&ldquo;OK, fine, then each time they deploy, there&rsquo;s a problem. I still don&rsquo;t see why
this caused so much outage across the Internet&rdquo;, might be the reasonable reply.
And this is where we get into why this matters to people outside the NodeJS world.</p>
<p>The NodeJS community, you see, has been at Ground Zero for a lot of the DevOps
movement&mdash;many of the ideas and concepts around DevOps have been put into play
in NodeJS environments. After all, think about it: write your source, then commit
the changes, and boom, everything is ready for a deploy&mdash;so it&rsquo;s trivial (in a
way) to wire this up into a full-blown DevOps pipeline, particularly since most
NodeJS-based systems are using REST/HTTP APIs for the back-end, which are always
much, much easier to automatedly test than other middleware options.</p>
<p>So when you go &ldquo;all in&rdquo; on the DevOps thing, and start doing daily&mdash;or
hourly&mdash;releases, suddenly a break in your deployment process becomes a really
big deal. Particularly if your &ldquo;rollback&rdquo; strategy is based around the idea of
doing a re-deploy of old code, as opposed to having a full backup of the server
(or server container image) that you can simply spin up without having to actually
run the deployment script.</p>
<h3 id="lessons:60dcd7231c05aebc967cadddc695fdf4">Lessons</h3>
<p>This kind of event, which qualifies as a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory">black swan</a>
event if ever there was one, still leaves quite a few lessons that developers can
learn from.</p>
<p>First of all, there&rsquo;s the obvious one that suggests that developers need to pay
close attention to their dependencies. Except in this case, when the dependency
simply disappeared, there was no real warning, and no way to avoid the problem.
(Except for the obvious, &ldquo;Well, don&rsquo;t use that package then!&rdquo;, which wouldn&rsquo;t
have applied in this case, since it wasn&rsquo;t a direct dependency, but one that
was loaded by another dependency&mdash;which means that nobody in the NodeJS world
actually understood that they were one 11-line package away from being horribly
busted.)</p>
<p>Beyond that, though, there&rsquo;s some interesting questions to be asked, and some
important lessons to be learned.</p>
<h4 id="question-who-owns-code-in-a-public-repository:60dcd7231c05aebc967cadddc695fdf4">Question: Who owns code in a public repository?</h4>
<p>Part of the discussion here is over the rights of code deployed to a repository
like npm (or Maven, or NuGet, or &hellip;). Assume I put my code under a license
model that clearly states that I retain ownership of the IP (as most open-source
licenses do), whereas the repository states a license model that states that they
obtain ownership of code made available through them. (The company that runs
the npm registry maintains their license document <a href="https://docs.npmjs.com/policies/license">here</a>,
but I am nowhere close to being a lawyer, and I don&rsquo;t know what npm&rsquo;s legal claim
is to any module published through them.)</p>
<p>I honestly don&rsquo;t know the answers to this one, and I&rsquo;m not entirely sure the
legal community does, either. There were no lawsuits filed as a result of this
whole debacle, but honestly there probably were grounds for one. From who,
against whom, for what, I have no idea.</p>
<h4 id="question-how-reliable-is-a-module-in-a-public-repo:60dcd7231c05aebc967cadddc695fdf4">Question: How reliable is a module in a public repo?</h4>
<p>Everyone assumes that any module you fetch out of a public repository is
solid and worth using. Sort of. The popular ones, anyway. Right?</p>
<p>Except that left-pad (the 11-line module in question) had been downloaded
well over a half-million times, and yet&hellip;.</p>
<p>How do we judge not just the quality of the code in the module (and who
actually does a full quality review on a package referenced from a public
repository?), but also the reliability of the developer(s) who published
it? To what standard do we hold them?</p>
<h4 id="question-how-much-liability-does-a-producer-assume:60dcd7231c05aebc967cadddc695fdf4">Question: How much liability does a producer assume?</h4>
<p>If I put a package into the repo, and you use it, and then I yank the package
back out of the repo, and your system is broken, do I have any liability?
Granted, all packages typically carry legal text that says &ldquo;You are using it
all at your own risk&rdquo;, but frankly those kinds of disclaimers are only as good
as the paper they are printed on (figuratively speaking), because a legal
disclaimer has never stopped a suit from being filed.</p>
<p>(It was explained to me thusly a number of years ago: If the skating rink
at which you rent your skates doesn&rsquo;t take proper care of the equipment,
including and not limited to the skates themselves, then they are liable for
injuries you sustain, regardless of the disclaimer you signed. Were the skates
properly maintained or not? That&rsquo;s clearly for a jury to decide, and most
judges will not hold the fact that you signed a disclaimer to mean that you
thereby agreed to use the skates without any assumption of proper maintenance
implied. Hence, the disclaimer/waiver doesn&rsquo;t eliminate all possibility of a
legal suit being successfully brought.)</p>
<h4 id="question-how-much-liability-do-you-want-to-assume:60dcd7231c05aebc967cadddc695fdf4">Question: How much liability do you want to assume?</h4>
<p>This applies equally to both producers of open source components, as well
as to consumers.</p>
<p>As a consumer, it&rsquo;s a pretty easy equation: If your app depends on a package
that has a 99% reliability factor, that feels pretty good. If, however, your
package depends on two packages, each of which have a 99% reliability factor,
your application&rsquo;s reliability is now 0.99 * 0.99, or 0.9801.</p>
<p>Do this for approxmiately a hundred packages, and suddenly your 99% reliability
factor realistically isn&rsquo;t. Fifteen packages is 0.86; fifty packages is 0.60.
(It drops off by about 1% per package up until about the 50 mark or so.) By
the time you get to a hundred packages, your reliability is now down to 0.36
and some change.</p>
<p>That&rsquo;s not entirely encouraging.</p>
<p>As a producer, you are taking on social liability, if not actual legal
liability, to not only verify that your package works and/or is free of any
bugs (up to a reasonable point), but that it will also be maintained over
time. This includes making sure your package in turn reflects changes to
the packages upon which it depends, too.</p>
<p>Side note: I just ran a Yeoman generator (&ldquo;node-express-mongo&rdquo;), and was
greeted with the following display, all of which are basically indicating
(as near as I can tell&mdash;I haven&rsquo;t tracked any of this down yet) that a
package being installed depends on outdated versions of other packages.</p>
<pre><code>npm WARN deprecated minimatch@0.2.14: Please update to minimatch 3.0.2 or higher to avoid a RegExp DoS issue
npm WARN deprecated minimatch@0.3.0: Please update to minimatch 3.0.2 or higher to avoid a RegExp DoS issue
npm WARN deprecated graceful-fs@1.2.3: graceful-fs v3.0.0 and before will fail on node releases &gt;= v7.0. Please update to graceful-fs@^4.0.0 as soon as possible. Use 'npm ls graceful-fs' to find it in the tree.
npm WARN deprecated lodash@1.0.2: lodash@&lt;3.0.0 is no longer maintained. Upgrade to lodash@^4.0.0.
npm WARN deprecated CSSselect@0.7.0: the module is now available as 'css-select'
npm WARN deprecated CSSwhat@0.4.7: the module is now available as 'css-what'
npm WARN deprecated graceful-fs@2.0.3: graceful-fs v3.0.0 and before will fail on node releases &gt;= v7.0. Please update to graceful-fs@^4.0.0 as soon as possible. Use 'npm ls graceful-fs' to find it in the tree.
npm WARN deprecated minimatch@1.0.0: Please update to minimatch 3.0.2 or higher to avoid a RegExp DoS issue
npm WARN deprecated tough-cookie@0.12.1: ReDoS vulnerability parsing Set-Cookie https://nodesecurity.io/advisories/130
npm WARN deprecated npmconf@2.1.2: this package has been reintegrated into npm and is now out of date with respect to npm
npm WARN deprecated lodash@1.3.1: lodash@&lt;3.0.0 is no longer maintained. Upgrade to lodash@^4.0.0.
npm WARN deprecated jade@0.26.3: Jade has been renamed to pug, please install the latest version of pug instead of jade
npm WARN deprecated minimatch@2.0.10: Please update to minimatch 3.0.2 or higher to avoid a RegExp DoS issue
</code></pre>
<p>This collection does not exactly inspire confidence. This list also
seems to be getting longer and longer every time I run a Yeoman generator
and install packages. What&rsquo;s worse, there&rsquo;s no single entity to which we
can point the finger&mdash;every single package maintainer inside the npm
repository needs to commit to keeping up with all the changes across
the entire repository, or else this system slowly breaks down due to
entropy.</p>
<p>And remember, entropy always wins.</p>
<h4 id="question-how-much-do-repository-entities-learn-from-each-other:60dcd7231c05aebc967cadddc695fdf4">Question: How much do repository entities learn from each other?</h4>
<p>Sonatype, the company that &ldquo;owns&rdquo; the Maven repository, went so far as to
<a href="http://www.sonatype.org/nexus/2016/03/25/npm-gate-lessons-learned-again/">blog about the whole situation</a>,
and it&rsquo;s well worth the read. They take a fairly selfish (meaning, from their
own) perspective on the situation, talking about what lessons the corporate
entity that owns npm should take away, but there&rsquo;s some good nuggets in there.
How much has the NuGet team read up on this? Or the Haskell community? What
was the thought process from the folks who maintain Ruby gems? And so on.</p>
<h4 id="supply-chain-management:60dcd7231c05aebc967cadddc695fdf4">Supply Chain Management</h4>
<p>All of these are the kinds of questions that any manufacturing company has
had to wrestle with, under the larger term &ldquo;Supply Chain Management&rdquo;. If you
currently run a software development department, and you currently use libraries
that are developed out-of-house (which is to say, everybody), then you owe it
to your customers and consumers and operations staff and executive management
to read up on this subject and find some ideas for how to manage your software
supply chain.</p>
<p>And no, there&rsquo;s no books on the subject of which I&rsquo;m aware, because, let&rsquo;s face
it, compared to the latest me-too Single Page Application framework, Software
Supply Chain Management is about as sexy as bridge physics or crop insurance.</p>
<p>Until the unthinkable happens, anyway.</p>
Speaking Tips: Mentor and Be Mentoredhttp://blogs.tedneward.com/post/speaking-tips-mentor-be-mentored/
Sun, 14 Aug 2016 15:59:34 -0700http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/speaking-tips-mentor-be-mentored/
<p>For many years, I&rsquo;ve quietly mentored a few speakers in the industry.
As I slow down my own speaking career, I&rsquo;ve decided to put some of that
mentoring advice into Internet form. And one of the key things I advise
new speakers to do is to sit on both sides of the mentoring fence.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s a pretty simple thing: If you&rsquo;re a speaker, look for a mentor.
This is the first thing any newcomer to Toastmasters does&mdash;pick a
mentor&mdash;so it&rsquo;s not like this is rocket science. I had a few mentors
when I started teaching at DevelopMentor two decades ago, and I learned
a ton from watching them do their thing.</p>
<p>But there&rsquo;s more to learning than just learning.</p>
<h4 id="maths-teaching-and-me:743cc90b3acf0f03cdd03ffd13083e9b">Maths, teaching, and me</h4>
<p>Many, many years ago, in grade school, I confidently informed a math
teacher that I didn&rsquo;t need to do the in-class exercise&mdash;I understood
the concept (heck if I can remember what it was; probably something
like multiplication or something really hard like that).</p>
<p>The teacher looked at me, then said, &ldquo;Well, fine, if you understand it,
that&rsquo;s great, you don&rsquo;t need to do the work. But could you do me a favor
and explain it to your classmate over here? He&rsquo;s still struggling.&rdquo;
Brim-full of confidence, of course I strode over to the other desk
where my classmate was still working to understand it (whatever it was
we were taught), and Lo and Behold! I couldn&rsquo;t really teach it to him,
either.</p>
<p>Because, as my math teacher then rather gently and kindly explained to
me, &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t teach what you don&rsquo;t know.&rdquo;</p>
<h4 id="political-science-lectures-and-me:743cc90b3acf0f03cdd03ffd13083e9b">Political science, lectures, and me</h4>
<p>What he neglected to tell me&mdash;which I discovered for myself years
later&mdash;is that teaching a subject also helps you learn it a lot, lot
better. I found that out while in some college study sessions; I had
this habit of reciting the professor&rsquo;s Poli Sci lectures in her voice
and accent, and wouldn&rsquo;t you know it, it was vastly easier to recall
her lectures when I did. I always ended up with some interesting new
insights on the subject whenever I did that, and in some cases, was
able to work that into essay questions during tests and papers.</p>
<p>You cant teach what you don&rsquo;t know, but you learn more when you
teach.</p>
<h4 id="mentoring-me-mentoring-you:743cc90b3acf0f03cdd03ffd13083e9b">Mentoring me, mentoring you</h4>
<p>If you&rsquo;re looking to be a speaker, offer to help those who are also
just getting started. The act of looking critically at their abstracts
and presentations will help you better critique your own. This is
because you will be able to critique their work far more easily than
you can your own, since you will not have the emotional connection
to the work that the other speaker has to it; and once you get more
accustomed to judging a work in a more objective and unemotional
manner, you&rsquo;ll start doing it to your own work more effectively.</p>
<p>And yes, I can now let the cat out of the bag: All these years that
I&rsquo;ve been mentoring speakers, if you thought I was doing it to
&ldquo;give back to the community&rdquo;, now you know I&rsquo;m actually just a
selfish conniving manipulator: this entire time I&rsquo;ve been
mentoring others, I&rsquo;ve actually been learning more about speaking
by teaching, and getting better myself as a result. What a jerk!</p>
<p>(Well&hellip;. OK, you caught me; that&rsquo;s not the only reason I&rsquo;ve been
doing it. I also do it because I just like teaching. And, sure,
whatever, &ldquo;community&rdquo;, we can go with that too.)</p>
<p>Point is, even if you try to mentor somebody who&rsquo;s just getting
started as you are, you&rsquo;ll effectively be forming a study group,
critiquing each other and learning from both positions. And that,
dear readers, is a large part of how we get better.</p>
Speaking Tips: No Speaker Noteshttp://blogs.tedneward.com/post/speaking-tips-no-speaker-notes/
Sat, 13 Aug 2016 03:31:26 -0700http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/speaking-tips-no-speaker-notes/<p>For many years, I&rsquo;ve quietly mentored a few speakers in the industry.
As I slow down my own speaking career, I&rsquo;ve decided to put some of that
mentoring advice into Internet form. I&rsquo;ve seen numerous speakers bring
notes to themselves up to the podium, and reference them during
the presentation.</p>
<p>In some cases, they try to hide the fact that this is what they&rsquo;re
doing, and in others, they just openly make reference to them. And
to many speakers, this may come as a surprise, but&hellip;.</p>
<p>Not. A. Fan.</p>
<p>First reason: eyes down on the notes is just as bad as eyes down
on the script on the monitor. Keep your eyes up. It&rsquo;s bad enough
that you have to be looking at the screen while you&rsquo;re typing out
the code for the demo, don&rsquo;t ruin your few moments for making eye
contact with the audience by giving your eyes something else
to look at right there on the podium.</p>
<p>But secondly&hellip;. why, exactly, do you need them?</p>
<p>More importantly, what&rsquo;s the message you&rsquo;re sending?</p>
<p>Using speaker notes sends one of several signals to the
audience, any or all of which might be true, but even if they&rsquo;re
not, this is still how it can/will come across:</p>
<ul>
<li>This stuff is really hard, so much so that not even the
presenter can get it right all the time. That means it&rsquo;s
REALLY hard. Matter of fact, if you don&rsquo;t have the notes,
you may as well just abandon hope, all ye who try to
recreate this demo at home.</li>
<li>This presenter doesn&rsquo;t really know the thing they&rsquo;re trying
to demo. I mean, if this isn&rsquo;t that hard, but you&rsquo;re using
notes, how often have you actually ever done this? Matter
of fact, how often have you even used this thing? Are you
actually qualified to talk about this stuff at all?!?</li>
<li>This presenter hasn&rsquo;t really practiced this demo at all, so
they need the notes to remind themselves of everything they
need to do during the demo. And if you haven&rsquo;t practiced it
at all, then how much practicing did you do for the talk as
a whole? (It&rsquo;s just inviting the audience to examine and
criticize the talk with a keener eye.)</li>
<li>The thing I am demoing is so new and/or so fragile, if the
speaker deviates from any part of the happy path, the results
are likely to be as spectacular and unpredictable as they
are wrong.</li>
</ul>
<p>Is this what you&rsquo;re trying to communicate to the audience?</p>
<p>On top of all that, what&rsquo;s the first thing the audience is going
to want from you after the talk? Those very same notes, so that
they can follow the notes when they try to do the demo themselves
at home, after the talk. Are you prepared to give them up?</p>
<p>If yes, then put them into a README and put the whole thing
up onto GitHub. Then you can reference your README in front of
the crowd, and everybody feels like they&rsquo;re back ontp a level
playing field.</p>
<p>If no, then figure out how to do the demo without having to refer
to the notes, because the attendees will feel cheated and/or
shorted when you refuse to turn them over. Even if you say,
&ldquo;Oh, these are just personal notes, it&rsquo;s not that hard, you
shouldn&rsquo;t need them&rdquo;, it doesn&rsquo;t work; in that particular
case, attendees know you&rsquo;re LYING, you liar liar pants on fire,
because you needed them yourself!</p>
<p>Most of the time, speakers I talk to say they want the notes
because they are afraid of bombing a demo and looking bad in
front of the audience. Audiences don&rsquo;t care that much if you
bomb a particular demo&mdash;they are willing to forgive a mistake
or two, so long as it doesn&rsquo;t deviate from the flow and pace
of the talk as a whole.</p>
<p>Just say no to speaker notes in any form.</p>
Speaking Tips: Never Memorizehttp://blogs.tedneward.com/post/content/post/speaking-tips-never-memorize/
Sat, 13 Aug 2016 02:39:12 -0700http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/content/post/speaking-tips-never-memorize/
<p>For many years, I&rsquo;ve quietly mentored a few speakers in the industry.
As I slow down my own speaking career, I&rsquo;ve decided to put some of that
mentoring advice into Internet form. One of the most important things,
although it seems like a good idea at first, is to never, never, EVER
memorize your talk. And that includes having a script for it.</p>
<p>It feels counterintuitive: If you&rsquo;re not a good extemporaneous speaker,
wouldn&rsquo;t it make sense to have what you want to say written down, so
that you don&rsquo;t have to try and think and speak at the same time? You
can focus on the speaking, since the thinking is already captured there
on the script, and that way you can deliver a better talk.</p>
<h3 id="the-fallacy-of-the-script:c48c60365ef85d7332ce03250782239b">The Fallacy of the Script</h3>
<p>Frankly, I find this to be a speaking fallacy, one which is perpetuated
by a variety of sources, particularly politicians. And honestly, given
how badly the current Republican candidate is at spontaneously speaking
to the audience, it would seem even more counterintuitive.</p>
<p>To begin with, let&rsquo;s put one thing to bed: You simply do not have the
time to memorize a talk. Nobody does. I&rsquo;ve been speaking for twenty
years (even longer if you count my high school stint through
Toastmasters), and only twice in my life have I ever delivered a
memorized speech. There is simply no way I could memorize and deliver
all of the technical talks I&rsquo;ve delivered over the years. Do I have a
few well-traveled jokes that I like to carry from one talk to the next?
Sure&mdash;that&rsquo;s a different scenario.</p>
<p>A memorized speech makes more sense when it&rsquo;s a one-off and it&rsquo;s
absolutely imperative that you deliver exactly the right words with the
right nuance and the right emotion at the exact right moment. A funeral,
a wedding, a commencement speech, these are places where a memorized
speech is appropriate. A technical talk, not so much.</p>
<p>And if you notice the use of the two different words there&mdash;&ldquo;speech&rdquo;
against &ldquo;talk&rdquo;&mdash;it&rsquo;s apparent there&rsquo;s a significant difference between giving
a persuasive and/or emotional speech, and delivering a technical talk.</p>
<p>To start, the lengths are wildly different. When President Obama delivers
a speech to the factory workers in Pennsylvania, he&rsquo;s generally not
talking for an hour&mdash;but when you do a technical presentation on
OData for the local user group, generally that&rsquo;s the length of time you
shoudl be aiming for. (Of course, each group has its own organization and
it&rsquo;s own wishes, but 50 - 75 minutes is the rough range for almost all
the software development conferences I&rsquo;ve seen.)</p>
<p>Secondly, Obama has a TelePrompter. You, sadly, do not. Yes, PowerPoint
and Keynote will allow you to put your speaking notes right there on
the screen in front of you, but the tendency then will be to put your
eyes down onto the screen, and not out to the audience in front of you.
And your eyes <em>need</em> to be on the audience in front of you&mdash;you need
to read their body language to see if they&rsquo;re getting it, or if they&rsquo;re
all confused, or if somebody has a question, even. Keep your eyes on
the audience, not your notes.</p>
<p>But lastly, Obama has speechwriters who understand how to craft the
spoken work in such a way that it sounds compelling, uplifting and
meaningful.</p>
<p>All you have is you.</p>
<p>What&rsquo;s more, the spoken word and the written word sound very, very
differently from one another. To see what I mean, go pick up the last
technical book you&rsquo;ve read, and flip to the the middle of a chapter.
Now read the first three paragraphs out loud. Seriously. Go do this.
I&rsquo;ll wait.</p>
<p><em>whistling</em></p>
<p>That was awful, no? Our eyes and our ears process information very
differently from one another. The eyes can pick up on patterns
quickly, and slide over unessential words particularly quickly,
which makes tricks like putting the word &ldquo;the&rdquo; twice in a row
in the middle of a written sentence (like I did in the previous
paragraph, which only some of you noticed) not a big deal. The
spoken word, however, doesn&rsquo;t sound at all like the written word,
which is why transcripts of people speaking off-the-cuff (and I&rsquo;m
thinking particularly of politicians here, since they&rsquo;re the easiest
examples of when they&rsquo;re reading prepared speeches and when they&rsquo;re
not, and it&rsquo;s ridiculously easy to tell which is which) sound so,
well, horrible. Go read the full transcript of an interview from
any talk show; whether the interview is with an athelete or a
politician, while the spoken interview feels natural and smooth,
reading the written transcript often feels anything but.</p>
<p>Spoken language is often far less formal than written language,
and until you get to a point where you can write something
meant to be read out loud, and speak something that could pass
for the written word without feeling stilted and awkward, don&rsquo;t
bother writing out or memorizing your speech. Have an outline
for the talk, to be sure (we&rsquo;ll talk more about that later),
but don&rsquo;t come anywhere close to memorizing it word-for-word.</p>
Speaking Tips: Slow Down and Drinkhttp://blogs.tedneward.com/post/speaking-tips-slow-down-and-drink/
Sat, 13 Aug 2016 02:01:18 -0700http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/speaking-tips-slow-down-and-drink/
<p>For many years, I&rsquo;ve quietly mentored a few speakers in the industry.
As I slow down my own speaking career, I&rsquo;ve decided to put some of that
mentoring advice into Internet form. In this installment, we talk about
speaking&mdash;and by that, I mean pacing.</p>
<p>It is a common theme with most new speakers that they need to slow down
when they speak. And by common, I mean pretty much every new speaker (and
even a few experienced ones) falls victim to this. So one of the things
that I tell new speakers to do is to put a Post-It somewhere on their
laptop that reads, &ldquo;Slow Down and Drink&rdquo;.</p>
<h3 id="slow-down:bebedcfe494c289097c92f4aae3b6424">Slow down</h3>
<p>Part of the reason a speaker goes faster during a talk is because they
are nervous, to be sure. That part, you&rsquo;re not going to get past until you
get a little bit of experience and practice under your belt. While I wish
there was a magical recipe for making the nervousness and anxiety go
away, alas, I know of no such thing. And, frankly, I&rsquo;m not sure I would
take it even if I could; nervousness, anxiety, whatever you want to call
it, is usually the dark corners of your mind trying to wind you up, and
the reason those dark corners can do that is because you&rsquo;re concerned about
doing a good job. If you didn&rsquo;t care about the quality of your presentation,
you really wouldn&rsquo;t be nervous, because seriously, who cares? Nail it,
blow it, whatever. That nervousness is A Good Thing, so don&rsquo;t be so quick
to toss it away.</p>
<p>(True story: Thirty years ago, I was attending a youth soccer/futbol
referee camp hosted by the legendary referee
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Aston">Ken Aston</a>. This is the man who
<em>invented</em> the red and yellow cards, people&mdash;he was the gold standard of
international soccer/futbol refereeing as you can get. During the closing
ceremonies of the camp, one of the other campers asked him about his career
and why he retired. He paused, then said, &ldquo;You know, during my last World
Cup, one of the other gents asked that same thing.&rdquo; He sort of went into
himself for a second to think, and then he said: &ldquo;Picture this: We are
standing in the tunnel leading out to the World Cup Final. Thousands of
people are screaming, singing, chanting. The teams are preparing to take
the field. We five are standing in the tunnel, looking out onto the pitch,
having our briefing before we begin, and that question comes up. &lsquo;How can
you walk away from this?&rsquo; was sort of the implication. I said, &lsquo;Gentlemen,
extend one of your hands and hold it flat to the ground.&rsquo; They did so,
and all four of them were visibly shaking. I put my own hand out, and it
was steady as a rock&mdash;no nervous shaking whatsoever. I looked at them
and said, &lsquo;That&rsquo;s how I know.&rsquo;&ldquo;)</p>
<p>Another reason speakers tend to speed up, however, is because they
labor under the misguided notion that they need to put as much material
into the attendees&rsquo; brains as possible&mdash;the attendees will be so bored
if I don&rsquo;t, and every second I&rsquo;m not piling new stuff into their heads
is a second they&rsquo;re going to think I&rsquo;m wasting their time, and&mdash;</p>
<p><em>Bzzzzt.</em> Nope. Wrong. Attendees, like you, are human. They need time to
process the information you have told them. As a matter of fact, in some
cases, they may even need time to just translate your words, if your
language is not their native tongue, before they can even begin to parse
the meaning. Particularly for heavily conceptual talks, or new ideas
that the audience hasn&rsquo;t seen before, it will take them some degree of
time before they can process it.</p>
<p>Don&rsquo;t believe me? Go to a standup show sometime. Watch the audience.
Particularly if the comedian is a dry-sense-of-humor kind of performer,
it will take the audience a second or two just to get the fact that he
cracked a joke, then a second or two to get the joke, and then they
start laughing. And most comedians are not talking about conceptually
heavy material&mdash;they&rsquo;re just trying to make you laugh.</p>
<p>Listening takes time.</p>
<p>This is why you need to slow down.</p>
<h3 id="drink:bebedcfe494c289097c92f4aae3b6424">Drink?</h3>
<p>Yes, drink. As in, bring a glass or bottle of water up with you onto
the stage (if the conference doesn&rsquo;t already provide one), and periodically
take a swig. Yes, it will create a pause in your presentation. It will
create dead air in which you are not talking. It will&mdash;</p>
<p>It will create a necessary moment where the audience can stop listening
to you, ingest your words, and start processing them.</p>
<p>Think of it as chewing and swallowing your material while you swig and
swallow the water, if that analogy works for you.</p>
<p>(Oh, and yes, I&rsquo;ve known some speakers who will bring something a bit
stronger than water with them up onto stage; I certainly don&rsquo;t recommend
it for your first presentation, but if you&rsquo;re giving a keynote on stage
and you want to try and exude a <a href="https://tatersalad.com/">Ron White</a> kind
of persona, go for it.)</p>
<p>Best part is, the water will also help with dry mouth and when the
speaking sucks all the moisture out of your throat and you start
coughing. Two birds with one stone.</p>
<p>Remember: Slow Down and DRINK.</p>